II The Visitors
No Thoroughfare—Occasional Visitors—Negotiations—Fox—M. P.’s—Ex-and Prospective M. P.’s—Peers and their Families—Baronets—Soldiers—Sailors—Functionaries—Lawyers—Doctors—Clergymen—Savants—Artists—Actors—Inventors—Claimants and Men of Business—Writers on France—Other Authors—Residents—Ancestors—Fugitives—Emigrés.
The Peace of Amiens reopened France, and not merely France but central and southern Europe, to British travellers. Since the outbreak of hostilities in 1793 the ‘grand tour’ had been suspended. Maritime ascendency, indeed, had always ensured our communications with North Germany and Italy, but the risk of capture by privateers such as befell Richard (afterwards the Marquis) Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington’s elder brother, on his return from Lisbon in 1794, coupled with intermittent campaigns and conquests by France, had virtually put a stop to foreign travel. Young noblemen in charge of tutors or ‘bear-wards’ had ceased to traverse the Continent, and French schools had ceased to receive British students. The schools, moreover, had mostly been closed by the Revolution. An Arthur Wellesley, even if inclined, could not have studied horsemanship at Angers, nor could a Gilbert Elliot have been the comrade of a Mirabeau at Fontainebleau. So also as to girls. Pentemont Abbey in Paris, where daughters of such aristocratic families as Annesley, Hobart, De Ros and De Bathe had been educated between 1780 and 1789, was shut, preparatory to conversion into a barrack,3 while the English Austin convent, where for 150 years Towneleys, Dormers, and Fermors had been pupils, sometimes when adults returning as nuns, though still in the possession of the community, had not yet been reopened as a school. London newspapers complacently calculated the money thus prevented from leaving the country.
It it true that a few of the Englishmen arrested as hostages for Toulon in the autumn of 1793, though released after the Terror, had been unable or unwilling to quit France. Christopher Potter, ex-M.P. for Colchester, in 1796 offered Lord Malmesbury, on behalf of Barras, to secure peace for a bribe of half a million. Captain Henry Swinburne, commissioner for exchanging prisoners, a collateral ancestor of the poet, likewise found in Paris about that date Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliott, ex-mistress of ‘Egalité’ Orleans, who remained till 1801, Admiral Rodney’s Portuguese wife and her two daughters, Richard Chenevix, grand-nephew of a Bishop of Waterford, Walter Smythe, brother of the famous Mrs. Fitzherbert, two sons of the Whitehall preacher Charles Este, and George Hamilton, a Jamaica planter whose wife, a daughter of Lord Leven, was afterwards, as we shall see, the companion of Sir Herbert Croft; but of course there had been scarcely any fresh arrivals. Indeed it was illegal for British subjects, unless with special permission, to cross over to France.4 They were liable at home to punishment for the attempt, just as they were liable if they reached the French shore to being prevented from landing or to incarceration as spies. Lord Camelford, Pitt’s eccentric cousin, who threatened if Horne Tooke was refused admission as a clergyman to the seat for Old Sarum,5 to nominate in his place his negro servant—a black man in lieu of a black coat—was arrested in February 1799 when on the point of crossing the Channel; but as his object was to examine the Mediterranean ports he was liberated, being, however, deprived of his naval post. We shall hear of him again. Boyd and Ker, bankers of whom too we shall hear again, made their way back to Paris in 1797 in the hope of recovering confiscated property, but were promptly packed off. A London newspaper of that year mentions that two men who had paid a Prussian captain eighty guineas for a passage from Dover to Calais were also unceremoniously expelled. Braham, however, and Miss Storace got to Paris and gave concerts in 1797. Thomas Hardy, the radical shoemaker, managed to send Thomas Paine a pair of shoes so good that Paine lent them as a model to a Parisian craftsman, but Hardy would not have found it easy to carry them over himself. Fishermen and smugglers, it is true, kept up intermittent communications, conveying newspapers or merchandise, but they seldom ran the risk of taking passengers. Even fishing-boats, moreover, which on both sides had been unmolested, were in January 1801 declared by the British Government liable to capture; but Bonaparte’s threat of recalling Otto, the commissioner of exchanges, from a country where the laws and usages of war were disregarded and violated,6 coincidentally with the resignation of Pitt on account of George III.’s objection to Catholic emancipation, led to this order being rescinded. Indeed the explanations given on this point by the new Addington Administration paved the way for peace negotiations.
There had been, it is true, isolated opportunities for Englishmen of forming or communicating impressions of France. Malmesbury7 had not only been at Paris in 1796, but at Lille in 1797, on both occasions receiving an offer from Barras through a Bostonian named Melville—probably the son of Major Thomas Melville, one of the Boston tea-party, the last American to wear a cocked hat—to conclude peace for £450,000.8 Malmesbury9 and his staff on their return assuredly found much avidity for information on the France transformed by the Revolution. That staff consisted at Paris of George Ellis, of the Anti-Jacobin, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, of whom we shall hear again, and James Talbot, afterwards Secretary of Legation in Switzerland.10 To avoid being mobbed they were obliged to wear the republican cockade whenever they appeared in the street. At Lille Malmesbury was accompanied not only by Ellis and Talbot, but by Henry Wellesley, afterwards Earl Cowley, and by Lord Morpeth, afterwards Earl of Carlisle. Not merely Swinburne but Captain James Cotes and General Knox were also sent to Paris between 1796 and 1799 to effect an exchange of prisoners. They must have been eagerly questioned on their return. The notorious Governor Wall, who, living in the south of France, had been refused service in the French army,11 went back to England in 1797, but clandestinely, and it would have been better for him had he remained on the Continent. He had to conceal his identity and his experiences.12 But Sir Sidney Smith had escaped from the Temple in 1798 after two years’ incarceration, and Napoleon in the following year released some English prisoners, sending them home with professions of a desire for peace. Sir Robert Barclay, a diplomatist captured at sea, was also, after half an hour’s conversation, liberated by him. Lord Carysfort, whose mutinous crew had taken him to Brest, was likewise permitted, in November 1800, after nine months’ detention, to visit his family on parole. Masquerier managed, moreover, in that year to visit Paris and to sketch Napoleon’s portrait for exhibition in London. Tallien, on the other hand, captured by the English on his way back from Egypt, had been allowed in March 1800 to return to France, where he could give a glowing account of the attentions paid him by the Opposition leaders, and of his presence, the observed of all observers, at parliamentary debates. On re-entering Paris he found that his handsome wife, Thérése Cabarrus, had become the mistress of the army contractor Ouvrard, and she never rejoined him.
But, broadly speaking, Englishmen and Frenchmen had for nearly a decade been perfect strangers, so that a British cartoon entitled ‘The First Kiss this Ten Years’ depicted Monsieur François stooping to kiss Britannia with the words, ‘Madam, permit me to pay my profound esteem to your engaging person and to seal on your divine lips my everlasting attachment.’ To which Britannia replies, ‘Monsieur, you are truly a well-bred gentleman, and though you make me blush, yet you kiss so delicately that I could not refuse you, though I was sure that you would deceive me again.’
The peace preliminaries were signed on the 1st October 1801. England, without waiting for the ratifications, released her 14,000 French prisoners,13 and on the 23rd October Boulogne, for the first time for nearly nine years, saw the arrival of an English vessel bringing 160 of these captives.
It is not my purpose to enter into the details of the negotiations, nor need I dwell on the rejoicings for the peace. Cobbett in London had his windows smashed for refusing to illuminate, and the jury recommended to mercy three of the delinquents, but Cobbett, though invited by the judge to join in this recommendation, declined, stating that he expected justice. The London mob took the horses out of Otto’s carriage and drew it, while Lauriston, grand-nephew of the famous speculator Law,14 on coming over with the ratifications received ovations. On the 1st November Lord Cornwallis, ex-Governor of India, accompanied by his son, Lord Brome (afterwards the second and last marquis), by his illegitimate son, Colonel (eventually General Sir Miles) Nightingale,15 his son-in-law, Captain Singleton, Colonel Littlehales (afterwards Sir E. Littlehales Baker), and Francis (brother of Sir John) Moore, started for Paris.16
Amiens had been chosen for the negotiations, but Napoleon, evidently wishing Lord Cornwallis to see how firmly the Consulate was established, had invited him to come round by Paris on the plea of showing him the illuminations of the 9th November in celebration of the peace with Austria. The road from Calais to Paris, which had since 1793 been almost deserted, was hastily put in repair for him, and was soon to be dotted with mail-coaches and post-chaises. Cornwallis arrived on the 7th November; he alighted at the Hotel Grange Batelière, the finest in Paris, it being an old mansion with spacious grounds, and he was received by Napoleon on the 10th. Napoleon suggested to him a reciprocal expulsion of foreign conspirators, the Bourbon princes to be packed off by England, and the United Irishmen by France; but Cornwallis naturally evaded so delicate a question. Napoleon did not invite him to dinner, and did not rise to receive Lord Brome in his box at the Opera, an incivility much commented upon. Cornwallis gave a dinner on the 16th to Lord Minto, who was on his way home from the Vienna Embassy, and five other fellow-countrymen.
‘After dinner,’ says the Times, ‘the company went to the Opera, where the performance was the Mysteries of Isis. Every part of the house was so crowded that numbers were unable to procure places. Some couplets were sung in celebration of the union of the two nations, which excited an enthusiasm that displayed itself by universal and repeated bursts of applause.
‘Lord Cornwallis was so extremely affected by the scene, that he shed tears! On his rising to go away, the audience recommenced their testimonies of applause. His Lordship showed how much he was flattered by the reception he had met with, by bowing to them in the most affecting manner. The following may be given as a specimen of the verses sung upon this occasion:—
“Anglais, Français, restez unis,
Qu’à vos chants l’Univers réponde:
Quand de tels rivaux sont amis,
Qui peut troubler la paix du monde?”’
Cornwallis also dined with Talleyrand, and Francis James Jackson, writing to Speaker Abbot (afterwards Lord Colchester), says:—
‘What do you think of Lord Cornwallis, with all his dignity of decorum, dining the other day at a table of thirty covers with the kept mistresses, and being obliged to hand out the ugliest and frailest of them, because she was in keeping of the minister for Foreign Affairs?’
On the 28th Cornwallis left for Amiens. There Joseph Bonaparte conducted the negotiations, and he speaks highly of Cornwallis’s straightforwardness. Cornwallis carried back with him to England cotton-velvet goods, to show his countrymen the superiority of Amiens looms, and the Calais municipality gave him a banquet before he embarked.17
Anthony Merry, who had been Consul in Spain, had been sent to Paris in July 1801, succeeding Cotes as Commissioner of Exchanges, but he assisted Cornwallis at Amiens, and during his absence from Paris Francis James Jackson, who had been Secretary of Legation first at Madrid, then at Berlin, and afterwards at St. Petersburg, and had been secretary to Pitt, acted as chargé d’affaires. Jackson was accompanied by his brother George, to whom Parisian sights were a novelty, and by Dawson Warren18 and Hill as attachés. Jackson, in reporting his arrival in November, stated that he had been loaded with attentions such as ‘the most refined system of civility could suggest.’ On the 4th January 1802 he presented his credentials to Napoleon, who said, ‘I am very glad to see an English minister here; it is essential to the civilisation of the world.’19 Merry returning from Amiens, Jackson left on the 18th April 1802,20 and Merry remained at the head of the embassy till December 1802. He was reproached with giving no dinner on George III.’s birthday on the 4th of June, but he was expecting to be superseded by Lord Whitworth, and his stipend probably did not allow of much display. The embassy was installed, as before the Revolution, in the Caraman mansion, faubourg du Roule.
Whitworth, formerly at St. Petersburg, had been appointed ambassador as early as April 1802, but on account of the delay in the nomination of the French Envoy to London his instructions were not drawn up till the 10th September, and he did not start till the 10th November. He went by Southampton and Havre, and was accompanied by his newly-married wife, the Duchess of Dorset, widow of the Ambassador to Paris of 1789, and by her two daughters. Her son, the young Duke of Dorset, remained at Harrow, where he was the schoolfellow and friend of Byron, but as we shall see he went over to Paris for the Easter holidays.21 Whitworth’s staff consisted of his brother, Colonel Whitworth, James Talbot, James Henry Mandeville,22 Captain Edward Pierrepont,23 and Benjafield, with the Rev. Thomas Hodgson as chaplain, and Dr. Maclaurin as physician. The Duchess of Dorset’s retention of her first husband’s title greatly puzzled the Parisians, many of whom actually believed that she was not married to Whitworth. According to Maria Edgeworth, the latter had at Paris the same house, the same wife, and the same horses as the Duke of Dorset had had in 1789, but the line should doubtless be drawn at the horses. He took with him six carriages, one of which had been the admiration of Londoners, though it was less imposing than that taken over by a Dr. Brodum, whose object was to promote the sale of his syrup for ensuring longevity. He presented his credentials on the 6th December 1802, and remained as we shall see till the 12th May 1803.24
The Dover and Calais mail packets did not recommence running till the 18th November 1801, but English visitors had begun to arrive as early as September or October, and Savary tells us that these pioneers facilitated the conclusion of peace, for they returned with assurances of the stability of the consular government. Napoleon on the 14th October instructed Fouché freely to admit English visitors, taking care, however, that they had Foreign Office passports, and were not French émigrés. One of them unfortunately lost his life. Charles John Clarke, of Hitchin Priory, had gone over with his wife. Their only child had died two years before, and they sought relief for their sorrow, intending to go on to Italy. Clarke was on a stand witnessing the fireworks of the 9th November in the Tuileries gardens when it gave way, and its eighty occupants were injured, Clarke so seriously, his spine being fractured, that after lingering nearly a month he expired. Napoleon sent his surgeon to make inquiries and offer his services, stating that he should himself call as soon as the patient was well enough to receive visitors. Clarke, who had been six years married, was only thirty-one years of age. His widow, several years his junior, carried his remains home.
Never before had there been such an influx of English visitors as during these eighteen months. ‘All the idle captives of the land of fogs,’ says M. Sorel, ‘shook their damp wings and prepared to take their flight towards the regions of pleasure and brightness.’ Even the influenza or grippe, which prevailed in January and February 1803, did not deter them, and they mostly escaped the malady, an escape attributed to their being habituated to humidity. ‘Ours,’ says Samuel Rogers, who was one of the visitors, ‘is a nation of travellers, and no wonder, when the elements, air, water, and fire attend at our bidding to transport us from shore to shore, when the ship rushes into the deep, her track the foam as of some mighty torrent, and in three hours or less we stand gazing and gazed at among a foreign people. None want an excuse. If rich, they go to enjoy; if poor, to retrench; if sick, to recover; if studious, to learn; if learned, to relax from their studies.’25 This, though written in 1839, is, with the exception of the reference to steam, applicable to the influx of 1801–1803. A few went for health, taking Paris as a stage to Montpellier, then still in repute, Nice, or Italy, others to recover property or for business, a few for study, most for pleasure. The current steadily swelled all the winter, spring, and summer. One of the earliest packets brought sixty-three ladies, and the Calais hotels were packed, seven hundred and ninety-eight passengers landing in ten days. In the last decade of Prairial (June 1802) there were ninety-one arrivals, in the last decade of Thermidor (August) ninety-seven, in the last decade of Fructidor (September) one hundred and fifty-six.26 This last average of fifteen a day seems small to us, but was surprising for that time. Merry states that there were once as many as five thousand English in Paris, and that when he left in December there were one thousand nine hundred. In the autumn he sent home long lists of persons to whom he had given return passports, and he had complained in May that he was so busy in issuing them as to have no time to attend properly to diplomatic business.
The cost of a trip to Paris was what in those days seemed moderate. For £4, 13s. you could get a through ticket by Dover and Calais, starting either from the City at 4.30 A.M. by the old and now revived line of coaches connected with the rue Notre Dame des Victoires establishment in Paris, or morning and night by a new line from Charing Cross.27 Probably a still cheaper route, though there were no through tickets, was by Brighton and Dieppe, the crossing taking 10 or 15 hours. By Calais it seldom took more than 8 hours, but passengers were advised to carry light refreshments with them. The diligence from Calais to Paris, going only four miles an hour, took 54 hours for the journey, but a handsome carriage drawn by three horses, in a style somewhat similar to the English post-chaise, could be hired by four or five fellow-travellers, and this made six miles an hour. £30 would cover the expense of a seven weeks’ visit, including hotels, sight-seeing, and restaurants.28 As for fashionable people, even if they went by coach to Dover, they posted from Calais to Paris, especially if they formed a family party and took servants with them. Some, like Lord Guilford, even shipped their own carriages, but he had to hire four sorry steeds at Calais, for horses were not allowed to land.29
Lord Elgin had four servants, Lord Yarmouth, with his wife and two children, had eight, Thomas Hope three, and Lady Maynard two. The journey occupied four days, if we may judge by the French General Hardy, who, captured in Ireland in 1798, had been exchanged—there being no English prisoner of equal rank—for four officers, four non-commissioned officers, and ten privates. It took him a day to get from London to Dover, another day for the crossing, and two days for the journey from Calais to Paris.
Passengers by Boulogne if arriving at low tide were landed in a singular fashion. Thomas Manning, of whom we shall hear presently, in a letter to his father communicated to me by his grand-nephew, Mr. E. B. Harris, says:—
‘The tide having ebbed, we were obliged to land without entering the inner harbour of Boulogne. It was night before the sluggish boat that the Boulogne mariners sent off could land us all, and a strange landing it seemed to me. The boat rowed towards the nearest shore till it ran aground, which happened in the midst of the breakers. In an instant the boathead was surrounded by a throng of women up to their middles and over, who were there to carry us on shore. Not being aware of this manœuvre, we did not throw ourselves into the arms of these sea-nymphs so instantly as we ought, whereby those who sat at the stern of the boat were deluged with sea spray. For myself I was in front, and very quickly understood the clamour of the mermaids. I flung myself upon the backs of two of them without reserve, and was safely and dryly borne on shore, but one poor gentleman slipped through their fingers and fell over head and ears into the sea.’
This primitive mode of landing had been noted in 1792 by William Hunter, who states that one of the ‘mermaids,’ unequal to the weight of a stout Englishman who had been reserved to the last, dropped him midway. Lanterns dimly lit up this curious scene.30
The return voyage had to be made on French bottoms, in order that the mercantile marine might be encouraged, and this regulation had its inconvenience, not to say dangers. The Times of 12th January, 1803, says:—
‘A navy Officer, who recently returned from Calais, where he had spent a few days, was actually under the necessity of giving directions, and afterwards exerting himself with alacrity, to preserve his own life and that of the other passengers. The master of the vessel, who was very much afraid of the violence of the wind, sat half-way down to the cabin, with his head under the companion, and covered with a huge night-cap, to prevent its reaching him, as he was (he said) grievously afflicted with the rheumatism; and to the repeated demands of the passengers, why he did not come upon deck and give orders for the safety of the vessel, he answered, deliberately, taking the pipe out of his mouth, that there was no immediate danger, and if any should arise, he had a good sea-boat, which would carry him and all his crew safe to land.’
Let us now see who were the visitors, beginning not with the earliest but by far the most eminent of them, Fox. He had not seen France since 1788, when he passed through with Mrs. Armistead on his way to Switzerland and Italy. Waiting, like many other M.P.’s, till his election was over, he started at Dover on the 31st July 1802, again accompanied by the so-called Mrs. Armistead (only now for the first time publicly figuring as his wife, though they had been privately married some years previously), by St. Andrew (afterwards Lord) St. John, M.P., and by John Bernard Trotter, his secretary.31 His nephew Lord Holland had engaged rooms for him in the faubourg St. Germain, but he seems to have removed to the hotel Grange Batelière and eventually to the hotel Richelieu, the mansion erected and formerly occupied by the notorious roué, Marshal (grand-nephew of Cardinal) Richelieu, who had entertained him in 1788. Fox’s chief object was to consult French records for his life of James II., his ancestor, and he daily frequented the National Archives for that purpose, in company with St. John, Robert (afterwards Sir Robert) Adair, and Trotter. Talleyrand, after his return to England, sent him a complete copy of Barillon’s despatches, which Fox had declared to be worth their weight in gold.
Many people in England fancied, however, that he was mainly bent on seeing Napoleon, and the caricaturists did not neglect so tempting a subject. Gillray, in a cartoon entitled ‘Introduction of Citizen Volpone and his suite at Paris,’ represented Bonaparte as seated on a chair surrounded by Mamelukes, while Fox and his wife,32 both extremely corpulent, are bowing and curtseying, Erskine, in legal costume with his hand on his heart, and Lord and Lady Holland making up the group. Another caricaturist depicted the reception by the First Consul of Fox, Erskine, and Combe. To Fox he says, ‘Fox, ha! How old are you?’ To Combe, ‘A brewer, Lord Mayor, ha! great pomp,’ and to Erskine, ‘Mr. Brief, ha! a great lawyer; can talk well. There, you may go.’33 Trotter tells us what really occurred:—
‘Bonaparte, of a small and by no means commanding figure, dressed plainly though richly in the embroidered consular coat, without powder in his hair, looked like a private gentleman, indifferent as to dress, and devoid of all haughtiness in his air. The English ambassador, after the presentation of some English noblemen, announced to him Mr. Fox. He was a good deal flurried, and after indicating considerable emotion said—“Ah, Mr. Fox; I have heard with pleasure of your arrival, I have desired much to see you. I have long admired in you the orator and friend of his country, who, in constantly raising his voice for peace, consulted that country’s best interests, those of Europe, and of the human race. The two great nations of Europe require peace. They have nothing to fear [from each other]. They ought to understand and value [esteem] one another. In you, Mr. Fox, I see with much satisfaction that great statesman who recommended peace because there was no just object of war, who saw Europe desolated to no purpose and who struggled for its relief.”’
Trotter adds that Fox, averse to compliments, neither replied to nor reciprocated them, and that a few questions and answers respecting his tour terminated the interview.
Napoleon afterwards invited Fox to a dinner of two hundred guests, to which he went unpowdered. John King, of whom we shall presently hear, thought it inconsistent of Fox to accept such attentions, which acceptance he attributes to a desire to please his wife; but Fox obviously could not decline an invitation from the ruler of the land whose hospitality he was enjoying, though he felt perfectly free to refuse to lunch with the brewer Santerre, notorious for his part in the execution of Louis XVI. According to the Rev. Stephen Weston, Napoleon complimented Fox as the greatest man of a great nation. Fox, as was to be expected, combated Napoleon’s accusations against Pitt, and especially against Windham, of complicity in the infernal-machine plot of 1800. Thiers gives an account of Fox being taken by Napoleon to the Industrial Exhibition at the Louvre, when a courtier sarcastically pointed on a globe to the small space occupied by England, whereupon Fox, spreading his arms round the globe, said, ‘Yes, but though we all spring from there we grasp the whole world.’ The truth is that though Napoleon and Fox happened to be simultaneously at the Exhibition they did not come across each other.34 It was Chaptal who conducted Fox over the Exhibition, and he tells us that Fox admired the specimens, but thought them too dear for common use, upon which Chaptal took him to the cutlery department, where Fox filled his pockets with cheap knives, and then to a watch stall, where he bought half a dozen watches at 13 f. a piece.35 He frequented the theatres. Not only, however, was his French very imperfect, but he committed a great breach of decorum by not calling on the two minor consuls, Cambacérès and Lebrun. He had to apologise through Merry. Lebrun overlooked the blunder and received Fox on his reparatory visit, but Cambacérès was ruffled, and insisted that Fox should make an unceremonious call as though he had been before.
We learn this from a secret agent of the Bourbons,36 who also tells us that Fox, after his conversation with Napoleon, said, ‘It’s all up with liberty.’ He could scarcely, however, have needed that conversation to form this judgment, for Napoleon on the 2nd August had been elected consul for life. Fox must have felt much more at home with Lafayette, with whom he spent a fortnight at La Grange, planting ivy round the newly-erected towers as a memento. He dined in Paris with Talleyrand and Junot, and went shooting with General Berthier. Madame Junot thought he looked with his dark grey coat like a Devonshire farmer, but when talking his countenance was radiant with intelligence, sagacity, and eloquence.37 On the 16th September he attended a sitting of the Tribunat, when the captain on guard, Boyer, thanked him for having in 1795 obtained the unfettering, and all but the liberation, of two hundred French officers at Porchester, a benefit which they would never forget. ‘Our chains were broken,’ said Boyer: ‘we were almost free.’38 At Versailles, on entering a room which he was told had long been shut up, he found his own bust, along with those of Algernon Sidney, Hampden, Chatham, and Washington.39 But was this a stratagem of Napoleon to flatter him? Curiously enough, Napoleon on his dressing-table at the Tuileries had, as the Edgeworths noticed, the bust not only of Fox but of Nelson, for whom he also entertained great admiration. He asked Mrs. Damer for a second bust of Fox, a commission which the lady could not execute till 1815.
Fox was criticised in England for taking tea with Helen Maria Williams, for it had been erroneously imagined, by Boswell among others, that she had marched exultantly over the bodies of the Swiss massacred in 1792. He was also twitted with meeting Arthur O’Connor, the United Irish exile. The fact was that he and Erskine went to dine with Madame Tallien without knowing that O’Connor would be there. Fox with great tact made the best of what he considered an unlucky incident by treating O’Connor exactly like the other guests, but Erskine was more embarrassed, for as counsel on his trial at Maidstone in 1798 he had vouched for O’Connor’s loyalty, whereas the latter had since made a confession of conspiracy.
Fox remained till the 11th November. ‘I have certainly,’ he wrote, ‘seldom spent a time pleasanter than at Paris, but I never in my life felt such delight in returning home.’ In 1806 he reciprocated the civilities shown him by sending word to Talleyrand that a Frenchman called Guillet had called on him and offered to kidnap Napoleon. Guillet was consequently arrested in Paris, and consigned, not to prison, but to Bicêtre lunatic asylum, where he died twelve months afterwards. Canning was guilty of the bad taste, not to say ignominy, of censuring Fox in Parliament for giving this warning, the generosity of which was warmly appreciated by Napoleon, as he told Lord Ebrington at Elba in 1814.
The general election had come rather inopportunely for visits to Paris, Parliament being dissolved on the 29th June, and the new House meeting on the 16th November. Elections, moreover, were much less expeditiously despatched than nowadays. Nevertheless about eighty M.P.’s, mostly Foxites, as Liberals were then called, but some Pittites or Ministerialists, went over either before or after the elections. Some of these M.P.’s are entitled to notice.40
Acheson, who in 1807 became Lord Gosford, revisited Paris in 1814, and became Governor of Canada. Adair, as we have seen, was the friend of Fox, and indeed was destined to be his last surviving friend. When visiting St. Petersburg in 1791 his letters home were in cipher, but forwarded through Whitworth, the ambassador, and he was absurdly suspected of having been sent thither by Fox to thwart Pitt’s policy.41 Barclay, as already mentioned, was a diplomatist, and had been a prisoner in France. He had just married a German lady at Hamburg. Baring was the famous banker, and though deaf from his youth sat and voted in Parliament. Benfield and Boyd not only come together alphabetically, but had been partners in a London bank which was wound up in 1799. Paul Benfield went out to India in the Company’s service, and there made a fortune, partly by trade, partly by fortification contracts and by loans. He advanced money to the Nawab of the Carnatic, on conditions for which Burke afterwards, with his customary vehemence, branded him as ‘a criminal who ought long since to have fattened the kites with his offal.’ In 1777 he was ordered to quit India, but he was subsequently reinstated in his post, and returned to Madras. In 1780 he became M.P. for Cricklade, and in 1796 he exchanged that seat for Shaftesbury, another of his five pocket-boroughs. He was also recorder for Shaftesbury, such appointments being sometimes conferred on or sold by corporations to men not even lawyers. In 1796 he assigned the second seat to Walter Boyd, whose sleeping partner he had become in 1793. Boyd had had a bank in Paris, and had been an agent for the French Revolutionary Government in paying for corn from England; but threatened with arrest in October 1792 he had fled, with his partner Walter Ker. It was alleged in December 1794 that he had sold to the French Treasury drafts for ten million francs on London, boasting that they would be dishonoured; but the Finance Committee, on investigation, declared the charge unfounded. In 1795 Boyd contracted for an English loan, but in 1797 his bank fell into difficulties. Boyd had entered into imprudent speculations, and when he went to Paris, calculating on the restitution of his property, the change of government there frustrated his hopes, and he was expelled. In 1799 Pitt, apparently in order to extricate him from his embarrassments, concluded a second loan with him without inviting tenders from any other firm, on the plea that this had been promised him in 1793. A select committee of inquiry severely condemned this transaction, but an obsequious House of Commons condoned it. It did not, however, avert Boyd’s bankruptcy. The two partners were now among the earliest visitors to Paris. They went at the close of 1801, Boyd still hoping to recover property. They were on the point of losing their seats for Shaftesbury, Benfield having sold that borough for £40,000 to a Colonel Wood. We shall see by and by how they sped in France.
Best, who became successively Serjeant Best, Sir Thomas Best, and Lord Wynford, reached the judicial bench in 1818, and in 1824 was made Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas. Originally a Whig, he ended as a violent Tory. Brodrick was Secretary to the (India) Board of Control. Burdett speaks for himself, as when, on being greeted at Calais as the friend of Fox, he exclaimed, ‘No, the friend of liberty.’ In the summer of 1793 he had attended the clubs and the Convention. Father of Lady Burdett-Coutts, he began as a demagogue and ended as a reactionary. He boasted of his election for Middlesex having cost him £100,000. He, with his friend Bosville, called on Thomas Paine, giving him £240 to clear off his debts and return to America. He also called, with his old tutor Lechevalier, on La Réveillère Lepaux, the theophilanthropist, on whom he made no favourable impression.42 Burdett, who had witnessed the early stage of the Revolution with more curiosity than sympathy, told Arthur Young, who had likewise seen something of that upheaval, that the Consulate was the completest military despotism that had ever existed.43
Lord George Cavendish became in 1831 Earl of Burlington, and succeeded his brother as Duke of Devonshire. Alderman Combe had been Sheriff of London in 1792 and Lord Mayor in 1799. Fox and Sheridan were godfathers to the son born to him during his mayoralty. Napoleon, according to Weston, said to him, ‘You were Lord Mayor in a year of dearth. I know what it is to have to keep people quiet when bread is dear.’ Unsuccessful at a by-election for the City in 1795, he had been elected in 1796. In 1800 he had convened a common hall to petition for peace. In 1805 he gave a dinner in his brewery to the Duke and Duchess of York, the Duke of Cambridge, Lady Anne Fitzroy, and other aristocratic guests. He ultimately resigned his aldermanic gown and seat in Parliament and confined himself to his business. He died in 1818.
Cowper was the son of Earl Cowper. Dallas, on returning home from the service of the East India Company, was the champion of Warren Hastings, and in 1793 and 1799 had written pamphlets against the French Government. The Marquis of Douglas, son of the Duke of Hamilton, was sent in 1807 as Ambassador to St. Petersburg. Ellis was afterwards Lord Seaford, taking his title from the little Sussex town for which he and his brother sat. Erskine, of whom we have already heard, became Lord Chancellor in the thirteen months’ Administration of ‘All the Talents.’ His son David, who accompanied him, succeeded him in the peerage.
Fitzpatrick, the intimate friend of Fox and the uncle of Lord Holland, was, like Fox, fond both of the classics and of gambling. He was an amateur actor and a wit. He had made an impressive speech in 1796 in favour of Lafayette, then a prisoner in Austria, and now visited him at La Grange. In 1806 he became Secretary for War. John Leslie Foster became an Irish Judge and lived till 1842. Philip Francis, the Indian councillor commonly regarded as the author of the Letters of Junius, escorted three of his children, Philip, Elizabeth, and Harriet, who went on to Nice for the benefit of Harriet’s health. We have no letters from Francis himself, but young Philip tells us that Bonaparte renewed (?) acquaintance with his father and was very civil. He likewise tells us that at Madame Bonaparte’s reception he saw Bonaparte, after watching her play for some time from behind her chair, drop a purse into her lap as he moved away. Francis, with his daughter Catherine, was again in Paris in January 1803, apparently from alarm at the miscarriage of letters from Nice, and while there heard of Harriet’s death. The Miss Berrys had been very kind to her. Francis had twice visited Paris in 1791, and his son had learned French at Rouen in the summer of 1792.44 Lord Granville Leveson-Gower became the first Earl Granville and Ambassador to France. His son we all remember as Foreign Secretary. Graham, the Ripon Graham, was the father of Sir James Graham the statesman. Hare, who sat from 1781 to 1804 for the Duke of Devonshire’s borough of Knaresborough, was a wit and a classical scholar who broke down in his maiden speech and thenceforth remained silent. He went to Paris for his health or fell ill when there, and Fox called on the invalid, who died shortly after his return. Jekyll, too, who had visited France in 1775, was a famous wit and a great diner-out. He also sat for a pocket-borough from 1787 to 1816, but his wit did not come out in his frequent speeches. The Prince Regent, fond of good talkers, made him in 1805 his Solicitor-General, and procured for him a commissionership in lunacy and a mastership in Chancery.
Johnston had been British Resident at Lucknow, and was an authority on India. Kinnaird, who in 1803 succeeded to the peerage, being intimately connected with the Bonapartists, had information in 1817 of Cantillon’s intended attack on the Duke of Wellington, and sent him an anonymous warning. He and his wife afterwards went to Paris to give information on the subject, and the latter was arrested as an accomplice. Kinnaird naturally complained of this as a violation of a virtual safe-conduct. He had been expelled from France in the previous year as a political intriguer. He eventually lived in Italy on an allowance from his creditors.45 Long, afterwards Lord Farnborough, had been Secretary to the Treasury, became a Commissioner of the Treasury in 1804, and in 1806 was made Secretary for Ireland. He had written pamphlets on the French Revolution in 1795. Eventually he was known as an art connoisseur, and George iv. sought his advice on architecture. His father-in-law, Sir Abraham Hume, accompanied him.
Lord Lovaine in 1830 succeeded his father as Earl of Beverley, and eventually in 1865, two years before his death, became Duke of Northumberland. He was the father of the Duke who adopted Irvingism and married Henry Drummond’s daughter. He went on to Naples with his newly married wife, Louisa Wortley, and his father, and on their return they found themselves, as we shall see, prisoners. Macpherson had in 1785 been Governor-General of India. Sir C. Morgan became Judge-Advocate. Lord Morpeth became Earl of Carlisle and father of the distinguished statesman. Nicholl, a frequent speaker and a strenuous opponent of the war with France, had visited that country in 1788–1789 and had made the acquaintance of the Abbé Raynal and other economists. Paget, afterwards Sir Edward Paget, son of the Earl of Uxbridge, was destined, as we shall find, to pay a second and involuntary visit. He had already served in Flanders, Minorca, and Egypt. He had been one of the hostages given to the French at Cairo till they embarked in July 1801. He afterwards served in Sicily and the Peninsula and was Governor of Ceylon. Parnell was the great-uncle of the Home Rule leader. He became Secretary for War, Paymaster-General, and Treasurer of the Navy, and in 1841 was created Lord Congleton. Lord Henry Petty, Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-five, and Pitt’s successor in the representation of Cambridge University (where he defeated Lord Palmerston), became on his brother’s death in 1809 Marquis of Lansdowne. After filling various high offices he survived till 1863 to the age of eighty, the Nestor of the House of Lords. Pollen, the accomplished son of a Surrey clergyman, had by one vote defeated the Duke of Norfolk’s nominee at Leominster. He afterwards raised a corps of Fencibles, whom he accompanied to Nova Scotia. On his way home in 1808, after several years’ travel in Russia and other countries, he was wrecked and drowned off Memel at the age of thirty-two. His wife applied for permission to return home through France, but the favourable answer being delayed, she embarked at Königsberg for England.46 St. John, as we have seen, was the companion of Fox, and afterwards succeeded to a peerage. Scott was the elder son of Lord Chancellor Eldon, but predeceased his father, leaving a son to succeed to the title.
John Spencer Smith, page in his youth to Queen Charlotte, was a diplomatist. He was asked by Napoleon whether he was not Sidney Smith’s brother, and Napoleon, on being answered in the affirmative, rejoined, ‘He is a good fellow and a good officer.’ Spencer Smith had been chargé d’affaires at Constantinople from 1796 to 1799, and there was a legend of his having married a rich Turkish widow. The truth is, his wife was daughter of the Austrian Baron Ratzbael. While staying at Venice for her health with her two sons in 1806, she was arrested as an alleged spy, and was to have been sent on to Valenciennes, but at Brescia, through the Marquis di Salvo, a friendly Sicilian, she escaped by a ladder from the window and made her way first to Austria and Russia, and ultimately to England.47 Napoleon had at the same time tried to arrest her husband, then Ambassador at Würtemberg, but burning his papers he fled in time. Occupying himself with archæology, Smith ultimately settled at Caen, where he died.
William Smith interests us as the grandfather of Miss Florence Nightingale, and also of George Eliot’s friend, Barbara Smith, Madame Bodichon, whose husband introduced the eucalyptus into Algeria. He is said to have been the only English Nonconformist in the Parliament of 1802, and his name was given to an Act of 1819, which relieved Unitarians from speaking of the Trinity in the marriage-service responses. Lord Hardwicke’s Act of 1752, while repressing irregular marriages, had inflicted a grievance on Dissenters by requiring all marriages except those of Quakers and Jews to be solemnised in churches. Smith, in 1822, tried to follow up his success of 1819 by introducing civil marriage, but his bill, though passing through the Commons, was shelved in the Lords, so that it was not till 1836 that Lord John Russell revived and carried it. A London merchant, Smith had sat for Sudbury and Camelford. On his standing in 1802 for Norwich, where Dissenters were and still are numerous, Thomas Grenville, foreseeing that he would oust Windham, directed his brother the Duke of Buckingham to return Windham for St. Mawes. ‘Smith,’ said Grenville, ‘was cooping up voters in barns and houses, where they are kept drunk till the day of poll; and in short, trying all the means of mischief that his fertile talents can supply in the mysteries of electioneering.’48 Smith, who was much respected, sat for Norwich till his death in 1835, and was succeeded by his son, Benjamin Smith.
Sturt, member for Bridport since 1784, was bred to the sea, but came unexpectedly into possession of the family estate in Dorsetshire. He retained, however, his liking for the water, had a narrow escape in a cutter race, and in 1800 was awarded the Humane Society’s medal for rescuing a man from drowning. He now went to stay at Havre. In 1801 he had obtained £100 damages from the Marquis of Blandford, son of the Duke of Marlborough, for the seduction of his wife, Lady Mary Anne Ashley, daughter of the Earl of Shaftesbury, whom he had married in 1788. The damages were small because Sturt himself had had an intrigue with Madame Krumholz, a famous harpist. Sturt’s sister, and he himself doubtless, had known Madame Dubarry on her visit to London in search of her stolen jewels. His nephew and namesake was an eminent Australian explorer. His grandson was in 1876 created Lord Alington.
The brothers Thellusson were sons of the Swiss merchant Pierre Thellusson, who settled in England, married in 1761 Anne Woodford of Southampton, and died in 1797, leaving a strange will, by which two-thirds of his property was to accumulate until the death of his nine then living descendants for the benefit of the eldest male descendant of his three sons. The sons disputed the will, but it was pronounced valid, though an Act of 1800 prevented any similar eccentricities. The testator’s object, moreover, deservedly failed, for the litigation of 1856–1859 on the construction of the will devoured a large portion of the inheritance, which meanwhile had not inordinately increased. In visiting Paris the Thellussons may have hoped to recover money due to their father, for he had been French Consul in London, and was denounced by John Oswald at the Jacobin Club on the 30th September 1792, on the authority of Paine and Frost, as a vilifier of the Revolution and a friend of Pitt. Thellusson, Oswald alleged, had refused to forward consignments of arms to France. If we are to believe a scurrilous pamphlet by Rutledge, Necker, who was originally clerk to Thellusson’s brother George in Paris, made the acquaintance of his future wife, Suzanne Curchod, through her being governess to the children of the Thellussons’ sister, Madame de Vermeron. Fournier49 suggests that the testator’s object was not for the money to accumulate, but to meet the possible claims of descendants of guillotined Frenchmen who had intrusted funds to him; but this is obviously far-fetched. The eldest son, who did not visit Paris, was in 1806 created Lord Rendlesham.
Thompson, if, as seems probable, the same man as the M.P. for Midhurst 1807–1818, was the father of General Thomas Perronet Thompson, M.P., the free-trade orator. Tierney spent the summer and autumn of 1802 at Boulogne, but did not go on to Paris. One would have expected him, however, to search there for traces of his father, who died during the Revolution after thirty years’ residence in that capital. Tyrrwhitt was secretary to the Prince of Wales, and was afterwards Usher of the Black Rod. He was knighted in 1814. Villiers, eventually third Earl of Clarendon, was famous for telling long-winded stories. He was Envoy to Portugal from 1808 to 1810, and was uncle to the diplomatist of our own time. On his honeymoon in 1791, on his way to Rome, he saw the French king and queen dine in public at the Tuileries. Coulson Walhope, son of the Earl of Portsmouth, was on his honeymoon trip, from which, as we shall see, he never returned. Sir Thomas Wallace had previously visited Italy. He subsequently held various public posts, and in 1828 became Lord Wallace. Wyndham was brother of Lord Egremont; his other brother William, ambassador at Florence, had visited Paris in 1791. Lord Yarmouth, son and successor of the Marquis of Hertford, was destined to be depicted in Vanity Fair as Lord Steyne and in Coningsby as Lord Monmouth. He had in 1798 married Maria Fagniani, putative daughter of John Baptist Fagniani. Her paternity was claimed both by George Selwyn and the Marquis of Queensberry, commonly known as ‘Old Q.’ The latter bequeathed his property to Lord and Lady Yarmouth, a codicil which reduced the amount to £250,000 being declared invalid.
Eight of these M.P.’s, Erskine, Fitzpatrick, Francis, Jekyll, St. John, William Smith, Lord R. Spencer, and Thompson had voted with Fox in 1794 for peace with France.
Several ex-M.P.’s may be here mentioned. Passing over Beckford, of whom we shall speak hereafter, there was Philip Champion de Crespigny, King’s Proctor, who sat for Sudbury in 1796. Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh had sat in two Parliaments for Portsmouth. Sir Abraham Hume, an F.R.S., had represented Petersfield from 1774 to 1780. He collected old paintings, fossils, and minerals, and ultimately published a biography of Titian. Sir Elijah Impey, ex-Chief-Justice of Bengal, had sat for New Romney in 1790. He was solicitous of recovering money invested in the French funds, and Madame Grand is said to have welcomed his arrival as likely to facilitate proof of the divorce required for her marriage to Talleyrand, for Impey had tried Grand’s suit against her. Sir John Ingilby was elected for East Retford in 1781. Temple Luttrell, who sat for Melbourne Port from 1774 to 1780, was son of Lord Irnham and brother to the Earl of Carhampton. His sister Anne, widow of Christopher Horton, had married the Duke of Cumberland, so that when Luttrell was arrested at Boulogne in 1793 he was styled George III.’s brother-in-law. In 1789, as a member of the Jamaica Council, he drew up a remonstrance to Parliament against the suppression of the slave-trade. He had shown more enlightenment in the House of Commons in advocating conciliation to the American colonies and in predicting their indomitable resistance. Matthew Montagu, nephew and heir of the great society leader Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson), to whose gatherings the term blue-stocking was first applied, had sat in Parliament from 1786 to 1790 and was destined to re-enter it in 1806. In 1820 he succeeded his brother as Lord Rokeby. Richard Oliver had in 1790 represented the County Limerick, for which his son now sat; we shall hear of him again. William Maule Ramsay, younger son of the Earl of Dalhousie, regained his seat in Parliament in 1805. In 1831 he was created Lord Panmure, and afterwards succeeded his cousin in the title of Lord Dalhousie. We shall hear of him, too, again. Henry Seymour, a kinsman of the Duke of Somerset, had been the penultimate lover of Madame Dubarry.50 He arrived with his daughter Georgina, widow of Comte de Durfort, as early as the 1st November 1801, but did not think it necessary or feasible, it seems, to claim the restitution of his private papers, confiscated on his flight in 1792. Even if he had claimed them he would have missed a bundle of Madame Dubarry’s love-letters, which had somehow been abstracted, and was discovered many years afterwards in a Paris bookstall. Possibly having been registered as an émigré, as though a foreigner could logically be so treated, he feared that to claim his papers might have entailed a denial of his right to revisit France. His French wife, whom he had dismissed on good grounds, was probably the ‘Lady’ Seymour who in 1806 was living on a handsome income at Cleves. Sir Robert Smyth, who had been unseated at Cardigan in 1775, but had sat for Colchester in 1785–1790, had, like Luttrell, suffered imprisonment in Paris during the Revolution, but through Paine, with whom his wife corresponded while he was in prison, had in 1796 obtained a passport for Hamburg. He now returned to Paris to open a bank, but making a journey back to London he suddenly died there in April 1802.
Prospective M.P.’s may here be mentioned. There was Lord Althorp, who, just of age, was sent by his father Earl Spencer, the great bibliophile, to France and Italy in order to cease running into debt and to acquire polish; but he refused to go into Continental society, was bored by pictures, and came home as unmannerly as ever, without having even learned French. He nevertheless developed into a prominent Whig statesman, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Grey Cabinet. His accession to the Upper House in 1835 gave William IV. a pretext for dismissing the ministry. He then retired into private life. Alexander Baring, son of Sir Francis and afterwards Lord Ashburton, sat in the House of Commons from 1806 to 1835, was President of the Board of Trade in 1834, and in 1842 negotiated the Maine Boundary Treaty with America. A Mr. Benyon was probably Benjamin Benyon, M.P. for Stafford in 1819. Lord Blayney, who in 1806 was returned for Old Sarum, was shortly destined to revisit France against his will. Sir Charles Burrell, another visitor, was elected in the same year for Shoreham. Arthur Harrington Champernowne, elected for Saltash in 1806, was a friend of Samuel Rogers. Cæsar Colclough, who, imprisoned in 1793–1794,51 had apparently remained in France, became in 1818 M.P. for Wexford. William Congreve, the inventor of the rocket bearing his name, became in 1812 member for Gatton, and in 1814 succeeded to his father’s baronetcy. Sir Arthur Chichester sat for Carrickfergus in 1812. General Sir Charles Grogan Craufurd, son of Sir Alexander and nephew of Quintin Craufurd, translated Tieck’s History of the Seven Years’ War, and in 1800 had married the Dowager-Duchess of Newcastle. Sent as Commissioner to the Austrian army, he was wounded, and resigned his post in favour of his brother Robert, M.P. for East Retford in 1806. He died in 1821.
Lord Duncannon, who in 1844 succeeded his father as Earl of Bessborough, but in 1802 was only just of age, supported Catholic Emancipation, introduced O’Connell to the House of Commons when he refused to take the oath, and helped to frame the Reform Bill. In 1831 he was Commissioner of Woods and Forests; in 1834 he was called up to the Lords, and from 1846 till his death in 1848 he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Robert Ferguson of Raith was a Scottish member in 1806–1807 and again in 1831–1841. Of him we shall hear, not to his credit. Hudson Gurney, a Norwich banker, of a famous Quaker family, had an uncle Bartlett Gurney, F.S.A., who in 1796 all but defeated Windham at Norwich. Bartlett had turned Unitarian, but in 1803 was buried with the Quakers. Hudson also renounced Quakerism, or rather Quakerism renounced him, on account of his contributing to the war patriotic fund of 1804, yet friendly relations were afterwards revived. He sat in six parliaments, and died in 1864 at the age of eighty-nine. I remember seeing him as a corpulent old man, who had to be lifted in and out of his carriage.
William Haldimand, son of a Swiss merchant settled in London, was so precocious a financier that at twenty-five years of age—seven years after his Paris visit—he became a director of the Bank of England. His brother, who accompanied him, apparently died young. William represented Ipswich from 1820 to 1826. He was munificent in his gifts to charities and to the Greek war of liberation. In 1828 he retired to Lausanne, and on his death in 1862 bequeathed most of his property to a blind asylum there. His sister was Mrs. Marcet, the friend of Sydney Smith, and well known as a populariser of science and political economy. Hugh Hamersley, M.P. for Helston in 1812, will come under another category. Richard Heber, elder brother of the bishop, and a great book-collector, was member for Oxford University from 1821 to 1826. Sir Thomas Liddell, elected for Durham in 1806, became Lord Ravensworth and father of a Dean of Christchurch. James Mackintosh, who in 1813, on his return from Bombay, where he had been recorder, was elected for Nairn, and retained the seat till his death in 1832, was the author of the famous answer to Burke. Napoleon, unaware that he had since ‘abhorred, abjured, and for ever renounced the French Revolution, the greatest scourge of the world, and the chief stain upon human annals,’ complimented Mackintosh on his pamphlet,—or rather intended to have done so—for the order of presentations having been altered he addressed the compliment to some other Englishman. Shortly after his return Mackintosh defended Peltier, prosecuted for libelling Napoleon. Viscount Maitland, afterwards Earl of Lauderdale, was returned for Camelford in 1806. William (afterwards Sir William) Oglander sat for Bodmin. Viscount Ossulston sat for Berwick in 1820. Samuel Romilly, who in 1806 became Solicitor-General and M.P. for Queensborough, was the great advocate of the mitigation of the penal code, so as to limit capital punishment to cases of murder. He had seen Paris in August 1789. Sir William Rowley represented Suffolk in 1812, Sir Thomas Turton, Southwark in 1810–1820, and Sir Walter Stirling, St. Ives in 1807. William Young, whose father wrote a history of Athens, sat for St. Mawes and became Governor of Tobago.
There was a perfect swarm of peers and peers’ sons;52 the elderly or middle-aged anxious to see how Paris looked after the Revolution, the younger eager to make acquaintance with it. Some, moreover, were on their way to Italy, for Lemaitre found at Naples, in February 1803, Lords Aberdeen, Mount Cashell, Grantham, Althorp, Brooke, and Beverley, besides Sir Charles Douglas, Sir Thomas Tancred, and the Cheshire Egertons, with Lady Hester Stanhope in their charge. The Dowager-Duchess of Cumberland, whose marriage led to the Royal Marriage Act, a widow since 1790, was also on her way to Nice, but stayed a month in Paris for medical advice. According to the Times she paid a hundred guineas a month for second-rate apartments, and not having been presented at the Court of St. James’s was not received by Madame Bonaparte, although previously to the Revolution she had been treated at Metz as a royal personage.
The Duke of Bedford interests us chiefly as the father of Lord John Russell, then a boy of eleven, who was left behind with his two brothers at school. The Duke was not a stranger to France. In March 1788 he and his wife, the latter on the verge of her confinement, were staying at Montpellier and waiting for that event. Her father, Viscount Torrington, who was apparently living in Paris, wrote to Louis XVI.’s Minister of the Household to ask what should be done to certify the expected birth. This was of some importance, for the traveller’s elder brother was unlikely to marry. The Minister advised him to call in two local notaries, adding that it might be well to get a certificate also from the British Embassy at Paris.53 The child was born on the 13th May, and became heir to the Duke of Bedford, for his father had in March 1802 succeeded his brother, who bequeathed £5000 to Fox. He had learned French when a youth at Orleans, together with the Duke of Cleveland, and the Duke of Dorset then took them both to Versailles, where Marie Antoinette played billiards with them. Both went on to Rome where they went to Cardinal York’s weekly receptions. Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh was now his travelling companion. The Duke’s arrival on the 20th April 1803 was considered a sign of the duration of peace, but he apparently went over to fetch the Duchess of Gordon and her daughter Lady Georgina, whom he, a widower since October 1801, took for his second wife five weeks after his return. Georgina had been engaged to his deceased brother, who left her a lock of his hair, and her mother made her go into mourning for him, saying, ‘It is a feather in a girl’s cap to have been intended for the Duke of Bedford.’54 The Duchess was reported to have said that she hoped to see Napoleon breakfast in Ireland, dine in London, and sup at Gordon Castle, but this is a manifest invention. There may be more truth in the story that she obtained recruits in 1794 for her son’s Highland regiment (now the 2nd Gordon Highlanders) by placing a shilling between her lips to be kissed by them, yet this seems a variation of the Duchess of Devonshire’s kiss to a Westminster elector. She died in 1812. As for her daughter Georgina, who had an illness in Paris, she was a great dancer, and frequently danced, as Napoleon told Lord Ebrington at Elba in 1814, with his step-son Eugène Beauharnais. The Times, indeed, insinuated that she set her cap at the step-father himself. ‘It is certain,’ said that journal on the 12th January 1803,
‘that some of our travelling Nudes of Fashion intended to conquer the Conqueror of the Continent. What glory would it have brought to this Country, if it could have boasted of giving a Mistress, or a Wife, to the First Consul. How pretty would sound Lady G—— (we mean Lady Godiva) Bonaparte?’
Wraxall’s story that the Duchess wanted to wed her daughter to Eugène is confirmed by Maurice Dupin, George Sand’s father, who met them at a dinner-party, and wrote to his mother that they were in love with each other, but that Napoleon would not listen to the match. Georgina, he added, was reputed a beauty, but like Eugène lacked a good mouth and teeth.55
The Duke of Newcastle, afterwards famous for justifying the eviction at Newark of forty tenants who refused to vote for his nominee by saying, ‘May I not do what I will with my own?’ was destined to give Gladstone his first seat in the House of Commons; which Gladstone, however, resigned in 1846 on joining Peel in free-trade. The Duke was yet only a youth of seventeen, in charge of his step-father Sir Charles Craufurd, who has been already mentioned. The Duke of Somerset deserves notice only as the father of the Duke of our time, who was first Lord of the Admiralty and an agnostic writer.
The Marchioness of Donegal was accompanied by her sisters Mary and Philippa Godfrey, friends of Thomas Moore. The Marquis and Marchioness of Tweeddale (she was daughter of Lord Lauderdale) took with them their young son, Lord James Hay.
Of the Earls, Aberdeen—Byron’s ‘travelled thane, Athenian Aberdeen’—was the future Prime Minister of 1852. His six weeks in Paris were said to have cost him £3000. Lady Bessborough had been at school at Versailles before the Revolution, and had been noticed by Marie Antoinette. Beverley, a son of the Duke of Northumberland, had been created a peer in 1790. He had distinguished himself by his courage during the riots of 1780, and we have already heard of his son. Cadogan had divorced his wife in 1796, so that she travelled by herself. Camelford had refused to illuminate for the peace, and his house had consequently been sacked. He pretended in 1801 to be an American named Rushworth, but was arrested, and after some days expelled. In March 1803 he again landed at Calais, but was discovered and apprehended, for he was said to have boasted in London that he would kill Bonaparte. He wrote, however, from the Temple prison an abject letter to Napoleon, pleading that his mother would die if she heard of his arrest. He also threw out of the window a letter to Lord Grenville, which the picker-up was requested to forward, but it was intercepted. He was sent to Boulogne and shipped to England.56 Jackson was afraid of his committing suicide, so that he must have shown symptoms of the mental derangement which led in 1804 to a fatal duel with Captain Best. He was reputed to be the best shot in England. Carhampton had in 1796 been commander-in-chief in Ireland. It was reported that incensed at having, in company with other English, to wait three hours in an anteroom without chairs, before being received by Talleyrand, he went next day to the Tuileries in colonel’s uniform without epaulettes. Bonaparte asked him therefore whether he was a militia officer. ‘No,’ he proudly replied. ‘Then what is your rank in the army?’ ‘I was Commander-in-Chief when the French army under General Hoche endeavoured to land in Ireland.’57 It was scarcely fair of Carhampton thus to retaliate on Napoleon for Talleyrand’s discourtesy.
Cavan had just returned from Egypt, where he had commanded a division under Abercromby. The Cholmondeleys had been in Paris in 1791, their son and heir being born there. We shall hear presently of their equipages. The Countess (afterwards Marchioness) Conyngham is notorious for her liaison with George IV. Egremont was long a prominent figure in London society, but is more deserving of notice as one of the earliest patrons of Turner the artist. Elgin, of marble fame, was on his way home from the Constantinople embassy. We shall have to speak hereafter of his wife and her paramour Ferguson. Fife, afterwards a distinguished general in the Peninsular War, wounded at Talavera and Cadiz, was great-uncle of the present Duke of Fife. Fitzwilliam had in 1794 been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, where his three months’ rule was looked back to with regret. Lady Granard, sister of the Earl of Moira, on her honeymoon in 1780 had seen Cardinal York, and had also witnessed a review by Frederic II. Guilford was the son of the Lord North who lost us our American colonies. He stayed seven months, and would have remained longer but for the rupture.
Lady Kenmare (Mary, daughter of Michael Aylmer) was known for her Sunday evening receptions in London, and for a romantic story of her husband’s attachment to her before his first wife’s death, or even before his first marriage. A Gerald Aylmer, who also visited Paris, was probably her kinsman. The Countess of Kingston, who must not be confused with the Duchess of Kingston, the notorious bigamist, was accompanied by two unmarried daughters, probably also by her other daughter, Lady Mount Cashell. One of these daughters had in 1798 been the occasion of a duel in which her brother shot his adversary. Lady Lanesborough, daughter of the Earl of Belvedere, had, as we shall see, found a second and plebeian husband. Lauderdale had witnessed and sympathised with the Revolution, Dr. (father of Sir John) Moore then accompanying him as physician. His Whig opinions had made him lose his seat as a Scottish representative peer in the House of Lords, and his anxiety for the maintenance of peace made Whitworth shut his door to him as one of ‘our rascally countrymen.’58 His son, moreover, a youth of eighteen, styled himself ‘citizen’ Maitland.59 Minto, the Gilbert Elliot who, ward of David Hume, was at school with Mirabeau, and was consequently sent over in 1790 to bribe him into keeping France neutral in our threatened quarrel with Spain over Nootka Sound, had been Governor of Corsica. He was one of the earliest visitors, was on his way home from the Vienna Embassy, and was destined to be Viceroy of India. Mount Edgecumbe was an amateur actor and musical composer. His wife,60 with their young daughter Emma Sophia, afterwards Countess Brownlow and writer of Reminiscences of a Septuagenarian, had previously been to Spa, where she met the Duchess of Gordon, the Conynghams, the Bradfords, Charles and Lady Charlotte Greville, and Dudley and Lady Susan Ryder. She had a serious illness in Paris. Lord Oxford had a great admiration for Napoleon and also for Murat. His wife, who required change of climate, was very handsome, though not rivalling Madame Tallien. Pembroke was the father of Sidney Herbert, the statesman of our time, and in 1806 was Ambassador at Vienna. He stayed three months, and being an excellent observer and a patient listener, his account of Paris was eagerly sought for. Shaftesbury, uncle of the philanthropist of our day, took his wife, a daughter of Sir John Webb, and their daughter. Winchilsea was the father of the fanatical Orangeman who in 1829 fought a duel, on account of Catholic Emancipation, with Wellington, but happily without bloodshed. Viscount Falkland, less fortunate, was killed in a duel in 1809. Viscountess Maynard was the notorious Nancy Parsons whom Lord Maynard had married in 1766, in spite of her antecedents. She had been a widow since 1775, and had been the mistress of the late Duke of Bedford, who, by his will, continued his annuity to her of £2000. Lord Monck, who took over his wife and two daughters, was the grandfather of the Viceroy of Canada. He died shortly after his return, in June 1802. Viscount Strangford was afterwards Ambassador at Lisbon, Stockholm, Constantinople, and St. Petersburg, and translated Camoëns’ Lusiad. Moore, Rogers, and Croker were among his friends.
We now come to the lowest grade of the peerage. Barrington, leaving a wife behind, but taking a mistress with him, probably went, from what we afterwards hear, to escape his English creditors; but we shall find that he got into debt in France. Blayney has been already mentioned among prospective M.P.’s, for, being an Irish peer like Palmerston, he was eligible for the Lower House. Cahir, who crossed over as early as June 1801, was afterwards created Earl of Glengall; he remained till April 1802. Invitations to Madame Bonaparte’s receptions were commonly obtained through his wife’s good offices. Lady Carington was the wife of one of Pitt’s banker peers. There was a rumour that Pitt intended to marry her eldest daughter. It was her grandson who, in 1872, having horsewhipped Grenville Murray on the steps of the Reform Club on account of a scurrilous article on his family in Broad Arrow, was convicted of assault at Clerkenwell sessions, but was simply bound over to keep the peace. Murray shortly afterwards became an outlaw. Cloncurry in 1859 published his reminiscences. He was accompanied by his three sisters, of whom more anon. He dined with Napoleon, and made acquaintance with Kosciusko, Helen Williams, and Madame Récamier. He invited the two Emmets to dinner the day before Robert’s return to Ireland, from which he could not be dissuaded. Cloncurry in the winter of 1802 proceeded to Italy, where he presented a telescope to Cardinal York, who gave him one of his medals, and he returned home after the rupture by way of Germany.61 Lady Crofton, widow of Sir Thomas Crofton, was a baroness in her own right. Her daughter Frances accompanied her. Grantham, who was on his way to Italy, in 1833 succeeded his aunt in the De Grey earldom. He was first Lord of the Admiralty in 1834–1835, and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1841–1844, was a collector of sculptures, was President of the Institution of British Architects, and published Characteristics of the Duke of Wellington. He was uncle of the present Marquis of Ripon, ex-Viceroy of India. Holland, who had seen Paris in 1791, protested in 1815 against Napoleon’s captivity at St. Helena, and Lady Holland, the divorced wife of Sir Godfrey Webster, forwarded the prisoner books, in gratitude for which kindness Napoleon sent her an antique diamond presented to him by the Pope. Lady Holland’s receptions were afterwards famous. Hutchinson had succeeded Sir Ralph Abercromby in Egypt. On his brother’s death he became Earl of Donoughmore. In the autumn of 1789 he had applied at Paris for an escort to go and rejoin his family near Amiens, disturbances having broken out there, but was told that order had been restored. He was Lafayette’s aide-de-camp from 1789 to 1792. Northwick was an art connoisseur. Stawell was Surveyor of Customs for the Port of London.
Of the eldest sons or other successors of peers, Eardley deserves notice on account of the history of his family. Sampson Gideon, a Portuguese Jew, made a fortune in London, and as a reward for financial services obtained a baronetcy, not for himself, for a Jew was then deemed ineligible, but for his son, then at Eton, at the age of fifteen. That son, Sampson the second, was brought up a Christian by his English mother, and was nicknamed ‘Mr. Pitt’s Jew.’ In 1789 he was made an Irish peer as Lord Eardley, a title explained by his having married, in 1766, Maria, the daughter of Sir John Eardley Wilmot, Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas. He was elected first for Coventry and afterwards for Wallingford, but retired in 1802. He had two sons, Sampson and William; the former was the visitor to Paris, but both died before their father, with whom the peerage expired in 1824. His three daughters married Lord Say and Sele, Sir Culling Smith, M.P., and Colonel Childers. Childers, the well-known member of the Gladstone Cabinet, was doubly descended from Pitt’s Jew, for his father was an Eardley Childers, and his mother a Culling Smith. Colonel Molesworth was drowned with his wife on his way to the Cape in 1815.
The younger sons of peers comprised Arthur Annesley (son of Viscount Annesley), Lord William Bentinck, afterwards Viceroy of India (Duke of Portland), William Brodrick (Viscount Midleton), Lord John Campbell (Duke of Argyll), Lord George Cavendish (Duke of Devonshire), Robert Clifford (Lord Clifford), Colonel Robert Clive (Lord Clive), Edward Spencer Cowper (Earl Cowper), Keppel Craven (Lord Craven), Francis Cust (Earl Brownlow), Henry Dillon (Viscount Dillon), Lord Robert Stephen Fitzgerald (Duke of Leinster), Lord Archibald Hamilton (Duke of Hamilton), William Hill (Lord Berwick), John King (Lord King), George Knox (Lord Northland), Lord Frederic Montagu (Duke of Manchester), Augustus John Francis Moreton (Earl of Ducie), Arthur Paget (Lord Uxbridge), Henry Pierrepont (Viscount Newark), Lord Arthur Somerset (Duke of Beaufort), John Talbot (Baroness Talbot de Malahide), and John Trevor (Viscount Hampden). Charles James Fox, Edward Paget, General Fitzpatrick, Lord Robert Spencer, and Charles Wyndham, have been already mentioned as M.P.’s.
There were also several daughters of peers. Lady Elizabeth Foster, widow of John Thomas Foster, M.P., was daughter of the Earl of Bristol, and there were strange stories of her relations with the Duke of Devonshire. According to the generally accepted version62 the Duchess, famous in election annals, was forced by her parents, at sixteen years of age, to marry the Duke, though she was in love with the Duke of Hamilton, who killed himself in despair. She refused, however, to allow him the rights of a husband, and Lady Elizabeth Foster, living harmoniously with them, had several children by the Duke, who were brought up under an assumed name. In 1789, however, the Duchess losing £100,000 at play at Spa, the Duke went over and paid her debts on condition of consummating the marriage. The result was the birth of a son and heir at Paris in January 1790. The Duchess died in 1806, and three years afterwards Lady Elizabeth agreed to marry the widower. Gainsborough painted her as Lady Foster in the picture mysteriously stolen in London in 1875 and recovered in America in 1900. She was now accompanied to Paris by her legitimate son, Augustus John Foster, who was just of age. In 1811 he was sent as Envoy to Washington, in 1814 to Copenhagen, and in 1824 to Turin. In 1831 he received a baronetcy. Lady Isabel Style, daughter of Lord Powerscourt, and widow since 1774 of Sir Charles Style, had been a prisoner in France in 1793, and now revisited France. Lady Anne Saltmarsh was daughter of the Earl of Fingall. Lady Hester Stanhope, daughter of Earl Stanhope, who was not yet her uncle Pitt’s housekeeper, was, to avoid a stepmother, travelling with the Egertons, probably Sir Peter Warburton Egerton.
There was also Lady Mary Whaley, née Lawless, the widow since 1800 of an Irish M.P., nicknamed Jerusalem Whaley, for, having said in joke that he was going to Jerusalem, he won a bet (of £15,000 it is said) that he would really go thither. At sixteen years of age this Thomas Whaley, inheriting £15,000 from his father, was sent to Paris with a ‘bear-leader’ to learn French. He there bought a town and country house, kept a pack of hounds, entertained company, and gambled, losing £14,000 at a sitting. He returned to Ireland, compounded with his creditors, and squandered the Jerusalem bet money. He revisited Paris in 1791, and witnessed the King’s return from Varennes. He became a cripple for life by jumping from a drawing-room window on to the roof of a passing hackney-coach, or, as we should now say, cab.63 He gambled at Newmarket, Brighton, and London, and eventually settled in the Isle of Man, where he brought up an illegitimate family.64 He married, in January 1800, Lady Mary Catherine Lawless, daughter of Lord Cloncurry, but died in the following November. His widow lived till 1831. She was accompanied by her sister, Lady Valentia Lawless, who afterwards married Sir Francis Burton, Lord Conyngham’s half-brother, and by Lady Charlotte, who became Lady Dunsany. There was likewise a Lady Giffard, probably Lady Charlotte Courtenay, daughter of the Earl of Devon, who in 1788 had married Thomas Giffard of Chillington, Staffordshire. Lady Charlotte Greville, née Charlotte Bentinck, daughter of the Duke of Portland, was there with her husband Charles Greville, father of the diarist. Miss Caroline Vernon, maid of honour to the Queen, was a daughter of Lord Vernon and died in 1815. Lady Catherine Beauclerk was daughter of the Duke of St Albans.
The baronets included, besides several already mentioned, William Call, John Chichester, Simon Clark, John Coghill, William Cooper, James Craufurd, Herbert Croft, Thomas Clavering, Michael Cromie, George Dallas, James De Bathe, Beaumont Dixie, N. Dukinfield, Alexander Grant, John Honywood, John Hope, John Ingilby, William James, Richard Jodrell, Thomas Lavie, John Morshead, George Prescott, George Shipley, Charles Talbot, Thomas Tancred, Grenville Temple, Henry Tichborne, Thomas Webb, Robert John Wilmot, and Charles Wolseley.
Some of these will be mentioned hereafter. At present we need speak only of Sir Charles Wolseley, who, like Sir Francis Burdett, boxed the political compass. He witnessed, and apparently took part in, the capture of the Bastille. In 1819 the Birmingham Radicals nominated him their so-called ‘legislatorial attorney,’ and in the following year he was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for a seditious speech at Stockport. He ultimately gave up political life, embraced Catholicism in 1837, and died in 1846.
Then there were also sons of baronets: William Abdy, who succeeded to the title in July 1803, Ashby Apreece, who predeceased his father in 1807, Alexander Don, Charles Jerningham, Raymond Pelly, John Wombwell, formerly a merchant at Alicante, Ralph Woodford, afterwards Governor of Bermuda, John Broughton, and William Oglander, who, already mentioned, succeeded to the title in 1806, while there were two future baronets, Thomas Hare and Charles Cockerell.
Next to legislators and aristocrats, military men were the most numerous class of visitors. Some passed through Paris on their way home from Egypt, which had just been evacuated, and others were actuated not so much by curiosity or love of dissipation as by professional duty, for they did not know how soon they might not have to encounter Bonaparte’s legions. Of this swarm of visitors I can only mention a few. There were the two sons of Sir Ralph Abercromby, who had been killed at Alexandria. The elder was General George already mentioned, who, eventually succeeding his mother in the peerage, became Lord Abercromby. The younger, Colonel Sir John, served with distinction, but died at forty-four years of age without reaching the highest grade. Sir Charles Ashworth became a general. Captain Benjamin Bathurst, son of the Bishop of Norwich, then eighteen years of age, was the diplomatist who in 1809 mysteriously disappeared on returning from a mission to Vienna. Napoleon was accused of having him murdered, but the probability is that he was killed for the sake of his valuables by the ostler of a German inn who was afterwards unaccountably affluent. His daughter Rose, at the age of seventeen, was drowned at Rome in 1824 by her horse slipping backwards into the Tiber, and his brother in a race at Rome was killed by a fall from his horse. Three disasters in one family.
William Bosville, commonly styled Colonel, though he had only been a lieutenant in the Guards, must be ranked with soldiers for want of any other suitable category, though he was more wit than soldier. He had, however, served in the American War. He dined every Sunday with Horne Tooke, and, as we have seen, accompanied Sir F. Burdett, whose election he had zealously promoted. He dressed like a courtier of George II.’s time. He visited Cobbett in prison and presented him with £1000. Paine, on reaching the United States, sent a message to ‘my good friend Bosville.’ Francis Burke, who had been in the Franco-Irish brigade, became a British general.
General James Callender had served in the Seven Years’ War and had been Secretary to the Paris Embassy under the Duke of Dorset, who, on his recall in October 1789, deputed him to wind up his accounts. He had more recently been Inspector-General at Naples, and had been sent by Nelson to the Ionian Islands, where he remained till the peace. While in Paris he made the acquaintance of a Madame Sassen, a German, and on being detained he sent her to Scotland with a power of attorney, styling her his beloved wife, to see after his affairs. When released, however, he denied having married her, and the Court of Session declared the marriage not proven, but awarded the lady £300 damages. This latter decision was annulled by the House of Lords, and the lady passed the rest of her life in fruitless litigation. Callender, who married three times, died in 1832 at the age of eighty-seven. The French Police Register describes him, the reason why is not obvious, as a swindler. On succeeding in 1810 to the estates of his cousin, Sir Alexander Campbell, he assumed the baronetcy also, but without right to it.65 General John Francis Cradock had served in India and in Egypt, was destined to serve in Spain, and in 1819 became Lord Howden. He altered the spelling of his name to Caradoc. His son, aide-de-camp to Wellington in Paris in 1814, and afterwards military attaché at the Paris Embassy, there married in 1830 the widow of the Russian General Bagration, an ex-mistress of Metternich. In July 1830 he was deputed by the Duke of Orleans to follow the fugitive Charles X. and ask him to confide to him his grandson that he might be proclaimed king. Charles was inclined to consent, but the child’s mother, the Duchess of Berri, dissuaded him, not thinking that her boy would be in safe keeping. On Caradoc reporting his failure Louis Philippe accepted the crown.
James Ferrier, brother of Susan the novelist, had figured in the siege of Seringapatam, and was questioned about it by Napoleon, always interested in India, which he thought he should have conquered but for Sir Sidney Smith and Acre. ‘When he speaks,’ Ferrier wrote home to his sister, ‘he has one of the finest expressions possible.’ General Dalrymple had visited Paris in 1791. General Henry Edward Fox was a brother of the great statesman. He was on his way home from Egypt, where he had refused to allow Lord Cavan to ship Cleopatra’s needle.66 Cavan had dug it out of the sand of centuries and set it upright, but Fox seems to have thought Cavan’s love of antiquities an absurd craze, and the needle consequently had to wait seventy years for transport to England. Afterwards Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, Ambassador at Palermo, and Governor of Portsmouth, Fox was accompanied by his son Stephen, also destined for diplomacy. General George Higginson, who married in 1825 a daughter of Lord Kilmorey, lived till 1866, and his widow reached the age of ninety-eight, surviving till 1890. General Baron Charles Hompesch was a Hanoverian in the English service. Very shortsighted, in 1806 he brushed against a man named Richardson and two ladies in a London street, and a duel ensued, in which his antagonist was wounded. On his death in 1822, at the age of sixty-six, he could boast of having taken part in three sieges, seven pitched battles, and thirteen minor engagements. Robert Lovelace, probably a son of Robert Lovelace of Clapham, was reminded by Napoleon that he bore the name of Richardson’s hero. Napoleon at eighteen had devoured Clarissa Harlowe, but at St. Helena he found it unreadable.
General John Money served in America under Burgoyne, and not finding employment at home had fought for the Belgian insurgents in 1788, had joined the French army in 1792, and had witnessed the capture of the Tuileries. The German Œlsner, who met him at Verdun in October 1792, describes him as a thoroughly English Hotspur (degenkopf).67 In 1761, aide-de-camp to General Townshend, he was famed for standing on a horse’s back without a saddle and then leaping with it at full speed over a five-barred gate. Hyde Park was the scene of his feats of horsemanship. He had a perilous balloon ascent in 1785, being nearly drowned in the North Sea. George Monro, probably a son of Sir Harry Monro, M.P., was apparently the Captain George Monro who was sent to Paris in September 1792 to send reports after the suspension of diplomatic relations.68 He had to pretend to fraternise with the British Jacobins in Paris, but he became suspected and left in January 1793. In 1796 he complained that though promised a handsome provision no fresh post had been conferred on him.69 General George Morgan, who went on to Nice, had been Commander-in-Chief in India, Sir Hildebrand Oakes, afterwards Governor of Malta, had served in America and Egypt. Captain Charles John O’Hara was doubtless one of the illegitimate sons of the general who should have married Mary Berry, and who was captured by the French at Toulon in 1793. Captain Samuel Owens was an equerry to George III. Major William Norman Ramsay had served in Egypt, was afterwards in the Peninsula, and was killed at Waterloo. Colonel John Rowley, of the Engineers, was an F.R.S. and inspector-general of fortifications. He became a general in 1821, and died in 1824. General Sir Charles Shipley, a distinguished military engineer, became in 1813 Governor of Granada. Colonel Edward Stack, a native of Kerry, had served in the Franco-Irish brigade before the Revolution, had been aide-de-camp to Louis XV., and had accompanied Lafayette to America. He was on board Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard when it captured the Serapis. He belonged to the orders of St. Louis and Cincinnatus. He joined the émigrés at Coblentz, but afterwards entered the English army, in which he rose during his detention in France to be major-general. He was arrested as a spy in May 1803, but was liberated on parole. If his age is correctly registered as forty-five in 1802, he was seventy-six at his death at Calais in 1833.
Captain Francis Tulloch, of the Artillery, had in singular circumstances made the acquaintance of Chateaubriand. Converted to Catholicism in London in 1790 by the Abbé Nagot, he had been induced to resign his commission and to sail with Nagot and three other priests from St. Malo for Baltimore, in order to become a priest and settle in America. Chateaubriand, a fellow-passenger, remonstrated with him, urging that, however ardent a Catholic, he ought not to abandon his family and his profession. The young man seemed to listen to him, but the priests recovered their ascendency, and on reaching port he left with them, not even bidding Chateaubriand farewell. He must, nevertheless, have changed his purpose, for in 1802 he was still in the army, and he eventually married and had seven children, two of whom wedded French noblemen. In 1822 Tulloch renewed acquaintance with Chateaubriand, then Ambassador at London. In 1827 there were family differences among his children, which gave rise to recriminatory pamphlets. Lastly, there was John Alexander Woodford, son of Sir Ralph Woodford (afterwards Governor of Trinidad, Envoy to the Hanse towns, and to Denmark). He was apparently the Colonel Woodford who in 1815 began digging up the bones of the killed at the battle of Agincourt, exciting such a commotion in the district that the French Government asked the Duke of Wellington to stop him.
Naval officers had less inducement to visit Paris, yet a number of them figure on the register. One of them, moreover, was a claimant to a French dukedom. Philippe d’Auvergne, a Jersey man, son of a navy lieutenant, had been adopted in 1788 by the last Duc de Bouillon, a descendant of Turenne, as a remote kinsman and heir (his only son being an idiot), in preference to nearer relations whom he disliked.70 The fascinating young sailor, whose elder brother had declined the heirship, lived with the old duke till the Revolution, when he rejoined the English navy, and from his station at Montorgueil in Jersey superintended the despatch of men and money to assist the Chouans. The duke having died in 1802, d’Auvergne now went over to try and recover his confiscated estates, but the French Government arrested him in September 1802 on the ground of his co-operation in the civil war. If a French duke he was of course liable to punishment, but if still or again a British subject he could not be prosecuted for the performance of professional duties. Merry, his letter to whom was at first suppressed, claimed him as a British subject, and he was released after about a week from the Temple but expelled. Major Dumaresq, a fellow Jersey man, had been arrested with him. D’Auvergne rose to be an admiral, but the Congress of Vienna rejected his pretensions to the dukedom. His romantic career ended in 1816 at the age of seventy-one. Admiral Tollemache (afterwards Lord Huntingtower) had an adventure at Paris. He was playing billiards when a French bully nudged his arm and spoilt his stroke. On the man doing this a second time Tollemache pitched him out of the window and then, warned by the landlord, ran for his life.71 Other actual or prospective admirals included Sir Eliab Harvey, who fought at Trafalgar, Francis Ommaney, William Hoste, Robert Dudley Oliver, John (afterwards Sir John) Talbot, John Temple, Sir John West, Sir James Hawkins Whitshed, and Sir Edward Berry. Nelson, on being condoled with by George III. on the loss of his right arm, presented Berry as his right hand, and it was Berry who caught him in his arms when wounded at the battle of the Nile.
But the most interesting and tragic naval visitor was Captain John Wesley Wright, an Irishman and secretary to Sir Sidney Smith. He had in 1796 been captured and imprisoned with Smith, and had escaped with him by means of a forged order. He was sent in March 1803 as an attaché to the Paris Embassy, albeit Whitworth pointed out to his Government that this was a very injudicious selection. Whether he remained at the embassy till Whitworth’s departure is not clear, but in May 1804 he was again captured off the coast, where he had been landing royalist insurgents. He was consequently regarded as an accomplice of Georges in the conspiracy to assassinate Napoleon, and was again confined in the Temple. Gravina, the Spanish Ambassador, interceded for his being treated as a prisoner of war, but Napoleon replied that as a criminal he could not be exchanged for an honest French officer, though he might be given up to the British Government to be dealt with as it chose, he being convinced that Lord Hawkesbury (afterwards Lord Liverpool) was alone responsible for having thrice landed conspirators against his life. This overture, if indeed it was an overture, came to nothing, and at Georges’ trial Wright was brought up as a witness. He was threatened with sentence of death by court-martial if he refused to give testimony, but he insisted on the status of a prisoner of war, responsible solely to his own Government for his acts. In October 1805 he attempted to escape, whereupon Napoleon ordered the ‘wretched assassin’ to be immured in a cell in lieu of having the run of the building. On the 25th October he was found dead in his cell. He seems to have been a religious man, and a few days before, on his mathematical instruments being taken from him, he had emphatically repudiated resort to suicide. Moreover he had on the previous day ordered three shirts and a French conversation book. The French Government, however, maintained that he had killed himself on hearing of the defeat and surrender of the Austrian army at Ulm. Sidney Smith, on revisiting France after Waterloo, made minute inquiries, and all the documents were shown him, but he could come to no positive result. Lewis Goldsmith says he was told by Réal and Desmarets that Wright had been tortured like Pichegru in order to extract evidence from him, and consequently could not have been released without this infamy committed by Fouché being exposed; but he was certainly not tortured prior to Georges’ trial, and why should he have been tortured afterwards, or, if tortured, why should he have been allowed to live till October 1805? Sidney Smith erected a monument over his tomb in Père Lachaise. It had a long Latin inscription which, without directly accusing the Napoleonic authorities, insinuated foul play, for it described Smith as ‘confined in the Temple, a prison infamous for its midnight murders.’ Strange to say this monument is now undiscoverable, and the cemetery keepers deny that Wright is on their registers, yet the record of his interment was found and duly copied in 1814.72 Mystery is thus added to mystery.
William Sidney Smith, nephew of Sir Sidney, was captured along with Wright and was sent to Verdun. His knowledge of French proved useful in 1814, when on board the vessel which conveyed Napoleon to Elba.
Diplomatists and other public functionaries took the opportunity of making acquaintance with France or French statesmen. Francis Drake, bearing the name of the Elizabethan hero, but claiming descent from an older family, had been at the Copenhagen legation, and was in 1794 Minister at Genoa, whence he sent Grenville letters from Paris furnished to him by the royalist agent d’Antraigues, who was then at Venice, and at first in the service of Spain; but the agency was transferred to ‘Monsieur’ (afterwards Louis XVIII.), who was living at Verona.73 D’Antraigues employed correspondents or spies in Paris who, whether from credulity or knavery, sent him the most fabulous stories written in sympathetic ink or in cipher. The letters of which Drake thus received copies were published in the second volume of the Dropmore Papers of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, where they were heralded with a flourish, but their worthlessness has been exposed by M. Aulard, the most competent French critic. This royalist agency in Paris was discovered in 1797, and on Napoleon’s advance into Italy Drake fled to Udine. Temporarily unemployed by the Foreign Office, Drake in 1802 seems to have visited not only France but Italy. In 1803 he was Minister at Munich, and was enticed by Napoleon into dealings with Méhée de la Touche, a spy who sold himself to all parties and betrayed all. Méhée was for a time a secretary to the Paris Commune and had a long career of trickery. Napoleon, always anxious to bring British diplomacy into ridicule, gave orders that a suitable man should be found to entrap Drake, and Méhée answered his purpose admirably. He pretended to give information of political feeling in France and to concert a royalist rising for the overthrow, if not for the kidnapping (a euphemism for assassination), of Napoleon. Drake advanced money to this pretended spy, who took all the letters to Paris, where they were forthwith published, bringing odium and derision on the English Foreign Office. An attempt was also made to capture Drake, as well as Spencer Smith, who was slightly implicated; but he fled precipitately, and the Elector of Bavaria at the instance of Napoleon refused any longer to recognise him as envoy. He had obviously broken the eleventh commandment, so vital in diplomacy, ‘thou shalt not be found out,’ and neither he nor Spencer Smith was again sent abroad. Wickham, however, who had equally committed himself, became in 1802 Chief Secretary for Ireland, and would have been sent as Envoy to Austria and Prussia, but that those powers, afraid of offending Napoleon, declined to receive him. He consequently retired on a pension of £1800. English diplomacy was no match for Napoleon with his flagrant violation of traditions and courtesies. Retiring to his Somerset home, Drake was highly esteemed by his neighbours; for his tombstone at St. Cuthbert’s, Wells, speaks of his integrity and firmness as a magistrate and as recorder of that city.74 He married a daughter of Sir Herbert Mackworth, an ancestor of the poet Mackworth Praed.
Alexander Cockburn, consul at Hamburg, took the opportunity of visiting Paris with his Creole wife, Yolande de Vignier, and his son, the future Lord Chief-Justice, was born in France during this visit. Cockburn was in 1825 appointed Minister to the Central American Republics. Sir John Craufurd, another nephew of Quintin Craufurd, was Minister to Lower Saxony from 1795 to 1803. He had visited Paris in 1791, and he now repeated his visit. We shall see that he stayed longer than he liked and took French leave. Charles Richard Vaughan, afterwards knighted, made a tour in France and Germany, and then accompanied Sir Charles Stuart (ultimately Lord Stuart de Rothesay) to Spain, where he wrote an account of the siege of Saragossa. He rejoined Stuart as Secretary at the Paris Embassy at the Restoration, and was eventually Envoy to Washington. Arthur Paget, son of Lord Uxbridge, was one of the earliest visitors, being allowed a passport through France in September 1801 on his way to succeed Minto at Vienna. He reported to Lord Hawkesbury that he found the roads much better than he expected and the land well cultivated, but the towns manufacturing silk and velvet complained of bad trade, and peace with England was universally desired. Bonaparte, he said, was generally liked, for people dreaded a revolution, yet Sieyès, he was told at Vienna, had declared that the Consulate would not last through the winter.75 George Stuart, his chief subordinate at Vienna, also visited Paris. Sir Robert Liston, originally tutor to Gilbert and Hugh Elliot at Paris, and afterwards secretary to the latter, was Ambassador in America from 1796 to 1802, was afterwards sent to Holland and Turkey, and lived to the age of ninety-three. Colonel Neil was Consul at Lisbon. We may also mention a future diplomatist, Charles (afterwards Sir Charles) Oakley, son of the ex-Governor of Madras, who, when at the Washington legation, offered to marry Madame Patterson, and she was not then disinclined to accept a suitable successor to Jerome Bonaparte. Those who were or had been in other departments of the public service included Thomas Steele, Paymaster-General, John King, Under-Secretary at the Home Office, Henry William Bentinck, Governor of St. Vincent, Perkins Magra, Consul at Malta and naturally interested in the fate of that island, Donkin, secretary to George III., and Brook, head of the London detective force, who was sent to report on the Paris system, while Napoleon sent a French detective to see what was done in London. There were also Sir Charles Warre Malet, ex-acting Governor of Bombay, and Sir Robert Chambers, late Chief-Justice of Calcutta, who before going out to India had been intimate with Dr. Johnson. This, as we shall see, proved to be his last journey.
Law, physic, and divinity were not numerously represented. Besides Erskine and other barristers sitting or destined to sit in the House of Commons, there was John Campbell, a future Lord Chief-Justice and Lord Chancellor, and the biographer of his class. He saw the ‘little Corsican,’ and visited Tallien. Thomas Wilde, afterwards Lord Chancellor Truro, was registered, doubtless in joke by himself or his companions, as M.P., though he was as yet only twenty years of age. Curran, who had been before in 1787, dined with Fox. Deploring the failure of the Revolution, he disliked Napoleon. He little foresaw that he was about meanly to disown his daughter Sarah on account of her attachment to Emmet.76 Stewart Kyd, a friend of Horne Tooke, prosecuted with other Radicals in 1794, had passed four months in the Tower, but had now sobered down and become a legal writer. The French police suspected him of being a spy. He had, in 1796, assisted Erskine in defending Thomas Williams, the publisher of Paine’s Age of Reason. A native of Arbroath, he died in London in 1811. William Duppa is best known as brother of the artist and as the biographer of Michael Angelo. Charles Henry Okey ultimately settled in Paris.
The physicians included Charles Maclean, who had been with Lord Elgin at Constantinople, and had also been in the East India Company’s service, but had been sent home by Wellesley on account of his quarrelsome disposition. Landing at Hamburg in 1801, he proceeded through Holland to Paris, in order to advocate the establishment at Constantinople of an international institute for the study of the plague. He was anxious for information on French suicides, and Holcroft had recommended him to apply not to a specialist but to Fauriel, the Sanscrit scholar. He denied the contagiousness of epidemics, and his medical crotchets, coupled with his controversial temper, prevented his being employed by the Government, wherefore he considered himself an ill-used man. George Birkbeck, the future founder of mechanics’ institutes, must be reckoned among the doctors: he accompanied Curran. Peter Mark Roget, a nephew of Romilly and a friend of Bentham, as yet Swiss rather than English, went as travelling tutor to the two sons of John Philips, a Manchester merchant, Edgeworth’s son accompanying them. His Treasury of English Synonyms is well known. William Woodville, the disciple of Jenner, and physician to the Smallpox Hospital, had been with Nowel to Boulogne in the summer of 1801, at the solicitation of Dr. Antoine Ambert, to introduce vaccination during a smallpox epidemic. He was an accomplished botanist. Dr. Wickham, another visitor, was likewise a friend of Jenner. On the other hand there were two strong opponents of vaccination. William Rowley, physician to the Marylebone Infirmary and an accoucheur of repute, and Benjamin Moseley, of Chelsea Hospital, who had been trained in Paris, and who had a strange theory that the changes of the moon influenced hemorrhage of the lungs. Tuthill (afterwards Sir George Tuthill) took over his handsome wife, of whom we shall hear again. James Carrick Moore, brother of Sir John, became director of Jenner’s vaccine institute. Benjamin Travers, as yet articled pupil to Sir Paston Cooper, was the first hospital surgeon to make of ophthalmia a special study. Thomas Young was inspector-general of hospitals. Of his distinguished homonym, although also a doctor, we shall speak among scientists. Of John Bunnell Davis and Farrell Mulvey we shall hear later on. James Carmichael Smyth, physician to George III., was destined to be the step-grandfather of Thackeray, for his son Major Henry Carmichael Smyth married Thackeray’s mother in India, and ‘sat’ for the character of Colonel Newcome. The physician received £5000 from Parliament for curing a jail distemper at Winchester in 1796 by nitrous acid; albeit a Dr. Johnston and a Frenchman also claimed the discovery. James Chichester Maclaurin, physician to the Paris Embassy 1790–1792, returned in the same capacity in 1802. He died in 1804 at the age of thirty-nine. His predecessor Macdonnal also revisited Paris. Michael O’Ryan had practised at Lyons, where Louis Badger, a silk-spinner of English descent, one of the victims of the Revolution—mistaken for his brother Pierre, he refused to undeceive his executioners, but Pierre was shot a week later—had married his wife’s sister. Fleeing from the Revolution back to Ireland, O’Ryan now went and settled in Paris. He was a great advocate of quinine.
Cardinal Charles Erskine, by virtue of his rank, claims priority among the clerical visitors. His father, Colin Erskine, son of Sir Charles, a Fifeshire baronet, was an artist at Rome, where he married a Roman lady. A letter to the French Government of 1808 giving an account of the College of Cardinals says:—
‘Erskine, 65 years of age, affects the greatest indifference to the present state of things (Napoleon’s rule), speaking of the Emperor with apparent moderation, but a dangerous man, perhaps the most dangerous of all; educated at the English college.’77
He was on his way back to Rome, after having been a kind of legate in England, where in 1801 he had had the invidious task of requiring the resignations of the French émigré bishops on account of the Concordat. Fourteen, however, out of the eighteen, headed by Arthur Dillon, Archbishop of Narbonne, refused to comply, and seven colleagues on the Continent followed their example. A good scholar, excellent company, and a loyal Briton, Erskine died in 1811 in Paris, having been interned there by Napoleon, and was buried in the Pantheon.78 Dr. Gregory Stapleton, Bishop of the English midland district, went to St. Omer to try and recover the property of the English college of which he had been the head until the Revolution, but he died there, without having continued his journey to Paris, on the 5th April 1802. A fellow prelate was Dr. Troy, President of Maynooth, and ultimately Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, who was anxious to obtain fuller restitution of the confiscated property of the Irish colleges in France and to re-open them, for Maynooth with its two hundred seminarists was insufficient. He went to Lord Cornwallis, who, however, was unable to help him. A staunch loyalist, he had assisted in carrying the Union, and was consequently in receipt of a State pension. William Walsh until the Revolution had been the head of the Irish college in Paris. Driven away by that event, he eventually recovered his post. Father Peter Flood, who had narrowly escaped the massacre of September 1792,79 was sent over by the Irish Catholic bishops to effect the fusion of all the Franco-Irish colleges. Tuite, who till the Revolution had been head of the English college at Paris, found that building converted to secular uses. John Chetwode Eustace, formerly chaplain to the Jerninghams, a Maynooth professor and a very liberal Catholic, had visited Paris in 1790, and was destined to pay a third visit in company with Lord Brownlow, Robert Rushbrooke, and Philip Roche.
Edward Stanley, the future Bishop of Norwich, and father of Dean Stanley, represented the Church of England, for he had just been ordained. He was on his way to Switzerland, and was disappointed at not seeing Napoleon. He was over again in 1816, when he heard drunken English soldiers singing on the boulevards:
‘Louis Dix-huit, Louis Dix-huit,
We’ve licked all your armies
and sunk all your fleet.’
And the French royalists imagined the song to be complimentary.80
Anglicanism was also represented by Stephen Weston, grandson of a bishop, who had been to Paris in 1791, and published rather flippant accounts of both trips. Then there was John Glasse, rector of Hanwell, a good classical scholar, whose sermon in 1793 on behalf of the French émigré priests made light of the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. Hanwell is associated with lunacy, and Glasse in 1810, in a fit of mental derangement, hung himself at the Bull and Mouth Inn, London. John Sanford was a witness of the scene between Napoleon and Lord Whitworth on the 13th March 1803, and in Notes and Queries of the 3rd April 1852, as the only surviving witness—for the Duchess of Gordon, her daughters, and Mrs. Greatheed were then dead—he gave an account of it. W. Hughes, landing at Dieppe in June 1802, visited Rouen, Caen, Blois, and other provincial towns before proceeding to Paris. Of John Maude, fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, we shall hear hereafter, as also of Churchill.
The Church of Scotland may be credited with John Paterson, for he was probably the future missionary to Russia and Scandinavia. Alexander and Joseph Paterson may have been his brothers.
Nonconformity was represented by William Shepherd of Gatacre, Lancashire, an intimate friend of Brougham, author of a life of Poggio, and also of a history of the American Revolution. The latter work Lord John Russell read in manuscript before publication. Shepherd had educated one of Roscoe’s sons, and was now escorting members of the Roscoe family. He took with him a letter of introduction to Miss Williams, at whose house he met Carnot and Kosciusko, spending a most agreeable evening. On repeating his visit in 1814, however, he apparently, judging by the silence of his Paris in 1802 and 1814, neglected to renew the lady’s acquaintance.
Turning to philosophers, scholars, and scientists, priority is due to Jeremy Bentham and Malthus. Bentham exercised the French citizenship conferred on him in 1792 by voting for Bonaparte’s life-consulate, an act not very consistent with his radical doctrines.81 His father had taken him over to France in 1764. Malthus, who, though a clergyman, should be classed as a philosopher or economist, little imagined how Frenchmen, mostly without having heard of him, would practise his principle. He revisited the Continent in 1825. Richard Chenevix, the mineralogist, who had witnessed and been imprisoned during the Revolution, had taken Brussels and Jena on his way to Paris.
The Institute had in December 1801 elected as foreign associates Banks, Priestley, Herschel, Neville Maskelyne, James Rennell, the geographer, and Henry Cavendish in the class of physics and mathematics; Fox in that of history and classics, and Sir Benjamin West in that of art. There had apparently been an idea of also electing Arthur Young, Horne Tooke, Sheridan, Watt, and Sir John Sinclair. Herschel, Fox, and West were the only three of the eight nominees who acknowledged the compliment in person. Herschel had the more reason for doing so as he had in 1790 been elected an associate of the old Academy of Sciences before it was swept away by the Revolution. Sir Charles Blagden, Secretary of the Royal Society, whose name is attached to the law of congelation, was presented to Napoleon, who told him that Banks was much esteemed in France, and indeed Banks had repeatedly obtained the restitution of consignments to the Jardin des Plantes captured at sea by the English.82 Blagden seems, though a scientist, to have had a mission from the English Government, for Andreossi, the French Ambassador at London, writing to Regnier on the 8th April 1803, reported a statement of General Miranda, who was intimate with Blagden: ‘He is in the pay of the Government; they were not at first satisfied with his reports, but he has changed his tone, and they are now better pleased.’ Andreossi added: ‘I am certain that he has spread it about here (in London) that I was in treaty on behalf of the Minister of the Interior for the purchase of a machine for “dividing” mathematical instruments, an object of great advantage to French industry, and requiring some precautions in order to be carried out.’ Blagden doubtless renewed his acquaintance with Desgenettes, the army doctor, who since his visit as a young man to London in 1784 had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, and was destined to accompany him to Moscow. Blagden, pronounced by Dr. Johnson ‘a delightful fellow,’ was also acquainted with Count Rumford, for whose daughter’s hand he was an unsuccessful suitor.83 After Waterloo he spent half the year in France and died there. Bonnycastle, Professor of Mathematics at Woolwich Academy, described by Leigh Hunt as rather vain of his acquirements, but a good fellow, fond of quoting Shakespeare and of telling stories, was another visitor, probably in the company of his friend Fuseli. Dr. John Fleming, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen, published in 1842 a History of British Animals. Osborn, an F.R.S., was living in 1806 at Weimar, where he explained to Goethe the battle of Trafalgar. Edward Pigott, the discoverer of the variable star in Sobieski’s belt or sword, had observed the transit of Venus at Caen in 1769, and that of Mercury at Louvain in 1786. He dated an astronomical paper from Fontainebleau in 1803, and in 1807 he observed the great comet, but the date and place of his death are uncertain.84
Perhaps the most eminent man of this category, scarcely less eminent than Herschel (though the latter discovered the planet now named after him, but originally styled by him the Georgium Sidus and by Frenchmen, Napoleon), was Thomas Young. He was the author of the undulatory theory of light, ridiculed at the time in the Edinburgh Review by that shallow scientist Brougham, yet now almost universally accepted, and he was the first to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. His uncle, Richard Brocklesby, the physician and friend of Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and Wilkes, bequeathed him £10,000, besides his house, library, and pictures. In 1801 Young, originally tutor to Hudson Gurney—both being then Quakers, but both destined to renounce Quakerism—and a medical practitioner, had found his true vocation as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution and editor of the Nautical Almanac. He has a nephew, a rent-collector at Bristol, who, however tells me that he was not born till after his illustrious uncle’s death.
It is difficult to draw an exact line between scholars, connoisseurs, and savants. Charles Towneley was famous, like Elgin, for his marbles, the fruits of his Italian travels from 1765 to 1772, and purchased after his death in 1805 by the British Museum. Turberville Needham, the scientist, had been his tutor in Paris in 1752, when his uncle John, translator of Hudibras into French verse, seems to have looked after him. Sir Abraham Hume, who has been already mentioned, was a famous collector of minerals and precious stones, and had purchased pictures by the old masters at Vienna and Bologna. He was one of the founders of the Geological Society, and lived to be at eighty-eight the senior F.R.S. Joseph Ritson, the antiquary, had been in Paris in 1791, when he was enthusiastic for the Revolution, and he actually adopted the Jacobin calendar. A strict vegetarian and an avowed materialist, he was latterly insane. Stephen Martin-Leake, herald and numismatist, sent over three of his sons, William, Stephen, and John, the two last likewise heralds. William Taylor, the friend of Southey, son of a Norwich manufacturer, and educated by Mrs. Barbauld, at Palgrave, Suffolk, had been sent on the Continent by his father in 1779, went again in 1788, and now repeated his visit. He was one of the first to introduce German literature to English readers. He met Paine at a dinner given by Holcroft, and had an introduction to Lafayette from his uncle Dyson, a Norfolk man whose son had taught Lafayette farming.85 Taylor went back an anti-Bonapartist. Paine had probably opened his eyes to Napoleon’s tyranny. Alexander Hamilton, a future F.R.S., had been in the East India Company’s service in Bengal, and on returning to England, after accompanying Lord Elgin to Constantinople, had continued his Sanscrit studies. He took with him his Creole wife and a promising son. Few as were then the students of Sanscrit, fewer still were the students of Chinese. Thomas Manning was one of them. Son of the rector of Diss, Norfolk, in whose church Wesley preached a few weeks before his death, though all other church pulpits had long been closed to him, Manning was also at Holcroft’s dinner, and we may imagine his being questioned about Diss by Paine, who had been a journeyman staymaker there. In his letters to his father—all beginning ‘Honoured sir,’ and subscribed ‘your dutiful son’—he mentions the Abbé Sicard, the teacher of the deaf and dumb, Carnot, Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand, and Laharpe. Manning, who suggested to Charles Lamb his roast pig essay, and was also intimate with Coleridge, is buried, like Malthus, in Bath Abbey.
Artists flocked to Paris to see the spoils from Italy collected at the Louvre. There was West (not yet Sir Benjamin West), with his son Raphael, who was expected to prove himself worthy of his Christian name, but failed to do so. It was this visit, perhaps, which left West no time to send a new picture to the Royal Academy exhibition in 1803; but he should not have attempted to palm off as new a ‘Hagar and Ishmael’ which he had exhibited in 1776. President though he was, the Academy insisted on its withdrawal. Opie was there with his wife, Amelia Alderson, who years afterwards gave an account of her visit in Tait’s Magazine. Seated on the boulevards, the future Quakeress sang ‘Fall, tyrants, fall,’ a pæan on the Revolution singularly out of place under the iron rule of Napoleon; but she had not yet discovered him to be a tyrant. Opie was so dazzled the first day by the white glare of Paris houses that he talked of leaving at once to avoid blindness, but the alarm soon passed off. Bertie Greatheed, the dramatist, was accompanied by his son, who copied assiduously at the Louvre, besides sketching a capital likeness of Napoleon. His copies were said to be so good that Napoleon refused at first to let them leave France, but relented on the young man’s death.86 Erskine also induced Napoleon to sit for his portrait to Philips, R.A., who finished it through the courtesy of Josephine while her husband was at supper. The portrait was sold at Erskine’s death and was apparently purchased by Lord Howden. Howden, who latterly lived at Bayonne, bequeathed it to the sub-prefecture of that town, where it still hangs, but not in a prominent place, so that it escaped notice till 1895, when, in a controversy on the colour of Napoleon’s eyes, attention was called to it.87 Richard Cosway, the miniaturist, and his wife, the musician and historical painter, repeated their visit of 1786, when Richard was trying to sell to Louis XVI. some Raphael cartoons which he had bought of Bonfield. André Chénier, the poet destined to the guillotine, was then passionately in love with Mrs. Cosway. He addressed verses to her, some in her name in full, others inscribed ‘d. r.,’ a contraction for d’Arno, on the banks of which river she was born. A Polish poet, Niemcewics, likewise enamoured of her, went to see her in London in 1787. She now studied at the Louvre, next went to Lyons, and then to Lodi.88 She subsequently started a school in Paris, which did not succeed, went again to Lyons, and eventually became head of a convent near that city. Daughter of an English hotelkeeper at Leghorn, she thus played many parts. Another female artist, Mrs. Damer, had been captured by a French privateer in 1779, but gallantly allowed to proceed to Jersey, where her father, Field-Marshal Conway, was governor. Josephine, whom she had known before her marriage, introduced her to Napoleon, who, as previously stated, bespoke a bust of Fox. Strawberry Hill House had been bequeathed to her by Horace Walpole. John Claude Nattes, one of the earliest of water-colourists and a topographical draftsman, took views of Paris, Versailles, and St. Denis. For unaccountably exhibiting drawings not his own, he was in 1807 expelled from the Water Colour Society, but he then resumed sending to the Royal Academy. Masquerier, of whom we have already heard, was again in Paris. Let it suffice to name Sir Martin Shee, President of the Royal Academy; Fuseli; Flaxman, who with his wife accompanied West; Duppa, who had witnessed French spoliation at Rome in 1798; Farrington, who accompanied Rogers; Bowyer, the fashionable portrait painter and illustrator of Hume’s History; Edward Hayes, the miniaturist, and his father, the more distinguished painter, Michael Angelo Hayes; George Bryant, engaged by the sportsman Thornton; William Dickinson, with his son, of whom we shall hear later on; Boddington; Hoppner, the naturalised German;89 Thomas Daniell; William Turner; Andrew Wilson; John Wright; Robert Flin; William Sherlock, who forty years before had studied in Paris, the illustrator of Smollett’s History, B. D. Wyatt, the architect; Abraham Raimbach, the engraver; Charles and James Heath and Jervis, also engravers; and Thomas Richard Underwood. Likewise an artist in her way was Mary Linwood, who in 1798 had opened an exhibition of art needlework, viz. copies of a hundred pictures of old masters and modern painters, and who went on working till the age of seventy-five, when eyesight failed her. Her Napoleon in woolwork is now in the South Kensington Museum.
But few actors had time—they can scarcely have lacked inclination—to visit Paris. John Philip Kemble, however, described in the register as rentier, went to see his old college at Douai, which he found so dilapidated that he had not the heart to inspect his old room. Arriving in Paris in July 1802, he made the acquaintance of Talma, who showed him, with his companions Lords Hollands and Cloncurry, over the Louvre. He then proceeded to Madrid to study Spanish acting. His brother Charles likewise went to Paris on his way to Vienna and St. Petersburg, not reappearing in London till September 1803. Their father Roger, a less accomplished actor, who never played but once in London, and then for the benefit of his son Stephen, is said to have spent from May 1799 to October 1802 in Italy and France; but this seems unlikely at his age, for at his death in December 1802 he was over eighty. Edmond John Eyre, the son of a clergyman, had left Cambridge without a degree in order to take to the stage. He was, however, an indifferent actor at Bath and Bristol. He published his Observations made at Paris.
We may couple with the Kembles and Eyre Mrs. Charlotte Atkyns, though she had long left Drury Lane where she was known as ‘the pretty Miss Walpole.’ She married in 1779, at the age of twenty-five, Edward Atkyns of Ketteringham Hall, Norfolk, who died in 1794. She was in Paris during the Revolution, and was one of those who endeavoured to effect the escape of Marie Antoinette. In 1809 she celebrated George III.’s Jubilee by a feast to the villagers of Ketteringham, at which she herself proposed the loyal toasts. The death of her only son in 1804 had then left her sole mistress of Ketteringham, but she seems ultimately to have lost her property. She was an ardent believer in the sham Dauphin Bruneau, but was nevertheless pensioned after 1815 by Louis XVIII. and died in Paris about 1829.
Let us turn to inventors. Congreve has been already named. James Watt had not seen France since 1786, when his advice was called for on the Marly aqueduct. This time he does not appear to have had any professional purpose, albeit that aqueduct was again out of repair. Thomas Wedgwood, one of the three sons of the great potter, was the future inventor of photography. An invalid in search of health, he required change of scene. He deserves mention for settling an annuity on Coleridge, and as the friend of Sydney Smith. He first went to Brussels, joined Poole in Paris, went on with him to Switzerland, and returned home in August 1803. Greathead, another inventor, doubtless wished to introduce his lifeboat. Robert Salmon, steward to the Duke of Norfolk and clerk of the works at the rebuilding of Carlton House, had invented a chaff-cutting machine, and probably wished to make it known in France, while William Story took out a patent for a blue dye.
There were also men of business and men who went over on business. Sir Elijah Impey, who has been named among the ex-M.P’s, had been chosen as delegate by a meeting in London of claimants for compensation for confiscated property, an article in the treaty having stipulated that such claims should be promptly settled by the tribunals. The article was nominally applicable to both countries, but England, of course, had had no revolution and had confiscated little, if any, French property. No such claims were settled before the renewal of hostilities, for Whitworth, reporting a conversation with Napoleon on the 23rd February 1803, says:—
‘I alleged as a cause of mistrust and jealousy the impossibility of obtaining justice or any kind of redress for any of His Majesty’s subjects. He asked me in what respect. I told him that since the signing of the treaty not one British claimant had been satisfied, though every Frenchman of that description had been so within one month after that period.’
The claims, as we shall see, were revived in 1815, when France gave a lump sum of sixty millions, leaving the English authorities to adjudicate on the separate claims. The claims certainly presented difficulties, for Merry, on the 12th May 1802, speaks of ‘clamorous demands,’ and on the 23rd June of ‘incessant and sometimes intemperate applications’; while on taking his departure in December he expressed mortification at having the claims unredressed.90 Even private papers were not restored, perhaps because being mostly tradesmen’s bills they were not thought worth reclaiming, but possibly because troublesome formalities were necessary. Merry had been directed to back the claim of the Duke of Richmond to the Aubigny estates conferred by Louis XIV. on his ancestress, Charles II.’s mistress, but in January 1803 Napoleon decreed that no British subject could possess landed property in France, and in 1807 Aubigny was definitely confiscated.
Among the business men, bankers may be allowed precedence. I do not reckon Rogers among them, for his visit had no more to do with banking than that of his brother-in-law Sutton Sharpe with brewing. But there were Boyd and Benfield, of whom I have already spoken. I have also mentioned Sir Francis Baring and his son Alexander. Hugh Hamersley, son of an Oxfordshire clergyman, and named Hugh on account of descent from Sir Hugh Hamersley, Lord Mayor of London in 1627, was one of the earliest lovers of Théroigne de Méricourt. According to her confessions or interrogatories when a prisoner in Austria, he promised her marriage, and she remained with him till 1785; but on coming into possession of his patrimony he took her to Paris, there indulged in dissipation, and returned without her, but settled 200,000 f. on her. Such a statement of course requires verification, but the tradition at her birthplace is that she eloped with an Englishman in the hope of becoming a public singer in London, for she had a fine voice. (Œlsner states, however, that after bearing a son to Persan de Doublet, who dismissed her with an annuity of 12,000 f., she went to London and lived with the Italian singer Carducci, a eunuch whom she induced to take with him to Italy, but they quarrelled and parted at Genoa.91 Œlsner is likely to have ascertained the true version of her antecedents. Did Hamersley inquire for the poor lunatic in 1802?92 He had been agent for the French Government in the maintenance of French prisoners in England until it changed its system and left England to support them. Madame Dubarry, on recovering her stolen jewels in London, deposited them with Hamersley. He subscribed £315 to the patriotic fund of 1803, and in 1812 was M.P. for Helston. On his death in 1840 his bank was wound up and yielded only 10s. in the pound. He had married in 1810 Margaret, daughter of John Bevan, a Quaker banker, and I remember his nephew or cousin as Chairman of Oxfordshire Quarter Sessions. Herries, brother of Sir Charles Herries, probably went to fetch his wife, who had been an eyewitness of the Revolution. Thornton and Power, English bankers at Hamburg and other Continental towns, opened a branch at Paris in 1802, and in 1805 John Power applied for French citizenship; but the police reported unfavourably on the application, alleging that the Hamburg bank acted for the English Government and that the Paris branch had furnished money to the conspirator Georges, though pleading ignorance of his criminal purpose. Thornton, they added, was an illegitimate son of the well-known M.P. and writer on finance.93 Thornton and Power seem to have amalgamated with Perregaux, who had dealings with London banks. Kensington was another London banker. William Dawes, assistant secretary to the Bank of England, was probably commissioned to report on the newly established Bank of France, and Mollien relates how Napoleon, on being shown an intercepted letter from a Paris to an English banker advising him to subscribe for its shares, exclaimed, ‘Such are merchants! Disputes between governments do not disturb their alliances.’
Speaking of merchants, William Ewart was the eminent Liverpool merchant after whom Gladstone was named on account of his father’s intimacy with him, while Judah, Henry, and Abraham Salomons were doubtless the uncles of Sir David Salomons, the first Jew returned to Parliament. There were also Joseph,94 Leon, and Moses Montefiore, of Bologna origin, the first of them already the father of Sir Moses Montefiore the philanthropist, then a youth of eighteen. This Moses Montefiore was on his way to Leghorn. James and Thomas Payne, eminent booksellers of the second generation, were doubtless bent on picking up rare volumes. James, succeeding to the business of Elmsley, had already profited by the dispersion of such treasures in the Revolution—the Lamoignon collection for instance. He had secured many prizes for Lord Spencer to enrich the famous Althorp collection, which in 1899 was purchased by Mrs. Rylands and presented to Manchester. He also had dealings with the British Museum and the Bodleian; and had supplied some rare English books to the Paris National Library, and helped in its catalogue.
William Hayes was another bookselling tourist, and there was John Nichols, the printer and publisher, the biographer of Hogarth and for nearly half a century editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine. He had just retired from business, and with his two daughters went to the south of France. Then there was Thomas Poole, the friend of Paine, the friend also of Coleridge and Sir Humphry Davy. He went to hear the Abbé Sicard lecture to the deaf and dumb.
From books to horses is a long jump. Edward Tattersall had been sent over in 1775 on an invitation from M. de Mezières, equerry to Louis XVI., and had much enjoyed himself. His father Richard, who supplied horses for the French royal stud, told the French host not to spoil the boy, but to make him keep his place, as he would have to earn his own livelihood.95 The mention of Tattersall naturally suggests Philip Astley, who hoped to recover ten years’ rent for his old circus, which had been converted into barracks; but while engaged in securing this, his London circus, in which he had introduced French performances, was burnt down. William Boffin Kennedy was a well-known florist who had Josephine as a customer, for in 1801, in a letter to Otto at London, she sent a list of flowers to be ordered of him. Lastly there was Dorant, proprietor of the York Hotel, Albemarle Street, London, who went over to cash £2000 in assignats, but found them worth just 12 f. He acted as cicerone, familiar as he was with Paris, to young George Jackson of the Embassy.
We now come to authors, whom we have reserved till nearly the last, not because they were the least important, rather the reverse, but because they are the most numerous. They may be conveniently divided into writers on Paris—chiels taking notes—and writers on other subjects. As to the former, it must be confessed that few of these accounts of Paris possess much merit or interest. There are, however, some notable exceptions. Thomas Holcroft, as ‘dogmatic, virulent, and splenetic as ever’ says King, had been prosecuted in 1794; but on the acquittal of Horne Tooke and others the case against him was abandoned. He had been to Paris in 1783, and again in 1785 to fetch his son back from school, when along with Bonneville, Paine’s future host, he wrote down Beaumarchais’s Figaro from hearing it at the theatre, being unable otherwise to procure a copy in order to have it performed in London. He had paid a third visit in 1799–1801, and he was now accompanied by his second wife Louise Mercier, who was born in France but brought up in England.96 He also took his daughter Fanny, the future novelist and translator, who married first Dr. Badams and secondly Danton’s nephew Merget. Holcroft in his Travels from Hamburg to Paris (1804) gives a good picture of Parisian society. J. G. Lemaistre, who went to claim a legacy, was one of the earliest visitors, for he started in October or November 1801, remaining till May 1802. In the latter year he published a Rough Sketch of Paris. He went on to Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, and in his Travels after the Peace of Amiens (1806) he gave a curious account of his dining with Cardinal York, then already getting into his dotage. Lemaistre was the son of an Indian judge, was described by Erskine as ‘a most agreeable, good-natured, sensible man,’ and was obviously of French or Channel Isle descent. Sir John Carr, a Rugby scholar, wrote numerous books of travel, his Stranger in France (1803) being his first attempt. In 1898 it was translated into French by M. Albert Babeau. No other visitor of 1802 has had a similar honour, but Paris as it was and as it is by Francis William Blagdon, a teacher of languages, was translated at the time into German.
John King, the author of Letters from France, reprinted I think from the True Briton, had a singular career. He was the son of poor Jewish parents, was apparently named (not of course christened) Isaac, and was brought up at a Jewish charity school. Thomas Paine, with whom he was afterwards to break lances, knew him young, penniless, and friendless, a flaming Radical. Clerk in a Jewish counting-house, he made use of his good abilities and started as a money-lender and bill-discounter, advancing money on post-obits to spendthrift heirs. He was also a frequent speaker at a debating club in Carlisle Street. In 1783 he published, dedicating it to Fox, Thoughts on the Difficulties and Distresses in which the Peace of 1783 has involved the People of England. He lived in style, and is described as a banker at Egham, but seems to have been simply a broker. As such, nicknamed ‘Jew King’ or ‘King of the Jews,’ he became notorious for litigation, figuring frequently in the courts as plaintiff, defendant, or witness, and he was roughly handled by cross-examining counsel. He was, moreover, twice imprisoned for debt. He had previously visited France, and in December 1792 he had denounced the Revolution. Twitted by Paine with his change of opinions, he replied that the Revolution, not he himself, had changed. At Paris he was accompanied or joined by his wife the Dowager-Countess of Lanesborough, a widow since 1779, and is said to have procured her son a rich wife.97 In any case he himself had obtained a potentially rich wife, for the Countess in 1814 came into possession for life of the estates of her brother, the Earl of Belvedere. A police note by Desmarest of the 2nd October 1802 gives no flattering account of King:—
‘This Englishman, a branded swindler, has just incurred another disgrace. His daughter, daughter of Lady Lanesborough his wife, last night quitted King’s house to rejoin her husband M. de Marescote (Marquis Luigi Marescotti) of Bologna. King for nine years had detained this young woman from her husband, and had always refused to give her up. He required Marescote to fetch her in England, because he would then have presented heavy bills, which he would have forced him to pay even by litigation. Madame M. took advantage of her stay in Paris to rejoin her husband. All this happened under the eyes and with the approval of the Italian Minister, Marescalchi, who beforehand informed the Minister of Justice. Mr. King has confined himself to preferring a charge of robbery against Miss Oliver, Madame M.’s lady’s-maid. King pretends to have had promises from two ministers for starting a rival English paper in Paris. He wrote some days ago to General Moreau, Santerre, Tallien, and a fourth person to invite them to dine with him, which they refused. It is presumed that his object was simply to obtain answers from them which he hoped to produce in London and thus make fresh dupes. He is always careful to write his letters in his own name and that of Lady Lanesborough, the latter name procuring him deference and answers. Senator Perregaux (a banker) who has been consulted respecting this foreigner, regards him as a swindler and as a dangerous man.’
This report must be a mixture of fact and fiction, for even if King, on Lady Lanesborough’s departure from Paris in October 1802, was left in charge of her daughter, he could not have been sequestrating her for nine years. Marescotti, moreover, when arrested at Cassel in 1807 and incarcerated at Bouillon, is described in another police report as a needy adventurer employed by the English Government. A German translation of Goldsmith’s book on Napoleon was in his possession, and he was charged with circulating pamphlets of the same kind. He was released in the following year, on the understanding that his brother at Bologna would keep him out of mischief.98 No mention is made of his wife, who had probably quitted him. Thomas Moore met her at Bologna in 1819 (her mother also he saw in Paris in 1821), and she lived till 1840. King’s banking partner Lathrop Murray, who pretended to be a baronet, became bankrupt in the summer of 1802, pleading in excuse that he had fallen a prey in Paris to King’s wiles, backed by French wines and by Lady Lanesborough’s attractions. Returning to England, King was arrested for debt in 1802, but published his book in 1803, and in the following year he issued a pamphlet entitled Oppressions deemed no Injustice toward Some Individuals. This was a protest against his rough handling in the Law Courts. He also published a Universal System of Arithmetic, but after his wife’s accession to her brother’s property, he lived abroad with her in good style. He died at Florence in 1823, and his wife, aged eighty-seven, in 1828.99 His Letters from France are not without interest. He mentions that Santerre, when lunching with him, justified his beating the drums at Louis XVI.’s execution, his object being to prevent royalist cries which would have led to bloodshed.
King naturally brings us to his fellow Hebrew, Lewis Goldsmith. Born at Richmond, Surrey, about 1773, he seems to have been in 1792 at Frankfort and in 1794 in Poland, whence he wrote to Lord Stanhope, urging him to bring the Polish cause before Parliament. Stanhope, however, though sympathising with Kosciusko, stated that the Anglo-Prussian alliance debarred him from doing so. In 1795 Goldsmith, as a friend of Joel Barlow, wrote a preface to the second part of Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders, an exhortation to kings and aristocrats to renounce their doomed prerogatives. According to Lord Campbell, Goldsmith had been an emissary of all the great European powers, yet in 1801 he published a pamphlet entitled The Crimes of Cabinets, in which he denounced the British and Continental Governments as bent on dismembering France. It was to escape prosecution for this tirade that he went to Paris, his wife Rebecca with their daughter joining him. He alleges, but it is difficult to believe him, that he was taken to Dieppe in order to be given up to England as a conspirator in exchange for Peltier, and that no such exchange being feasible he was sent back to Paris. There, it is clear, he offered his services to Napoleon, who conceived the idea of starting an English newspaper in Paris to circulate his ideas in England and its colonies. Curiously enough Napoleon was an unconscious plagiary of the Commonwealth, which in 1650 founded or supported a French weekly newspaper, Nouvelles Ordinaires de Londres, for circulation on the Continent.100 That newspaper lasted only eight years, and the Paris Argus lasted about as long. There must have been a staff of English compositors to bring it out. It gave copious extracts from the London journals, but was violently anti-English or at least anti-ministerial in its tone. Goldsmith afterwards disclaimed responsibility for its diatribes, insisting that he simply inserted the articles sent him. In November 1802 Napoleon ordered five hundred copies to be regularly sent to the French West Indies in order thence to reach the neighbouring British colonies. The paper was described by Merry as a ‘despicable publication.’ But in February 1803 Goldsmith was dismissed, which Whitworth notified as a sign of peace, the paper having changed its tone. His successor was Thomas Hutton, ex-editor of the Dramatic Censor, who soon incurred disgrace and imprisonment. Goldsmith, pleading penury, asked for 7000 f. compensation. He had, he said, been promised the proprietorship, and had been put to great expense by his wife bringing over her furniture from England. He had also paid in advance for his daughter’s schooling,101 and being threatened with assassination by the English in Paris he was anxious to leave.102 He remained, however, for in 1804–1805 he published with Barère the Memorial Anti-Britannique. He also translated Blackstone into French, and he advertised in the Petites Affiches in 1805–1806 as a pupil of Scott and Schabracq, London notaries, and as a sworn interpreter ready to undertake translations and other business.
Returning in 1809 to England with a passport from Dunkirk for America, he was imprisoned for a short time in Tuthill Fields, but on his release began to write violently against Napoleon. Goldsmith published in 1811 the Secret History of the Cabinet of Bonaparte, and he proposed in 1815 that a price should be set on Bonaparte’s head. In spite of these provocative, not to say scurrilous, publications, he after Waterloo settled down quietly in Paris till his death in 1846 as solicitor to the British Embassy. One of his duties was to hand over the letters or parcels which in those days of dear postage and carriage were franked by the Foreign Office, and a friend of mine, sent as a young man to Paris to get a French polish, remembers how Goldsmith used to quiz or banter him on the supposed feminine source of such consignments. But the most romantic event in Goldsmith’s career, a kind of parallel to King’s marriage, was the marriage in 1837 of his handsome daughter Georgiana, born in Paris in 1807, to Lord Lyndhurst, ex-Lord Chancellor. ‘I lived in Paris,’ she told Augustus Hare in 1881, ‘with my father, and I was nobody. I never expected to marry. Why should I? I had no fortune and no attractions.’ Lyndhurst first saw her when visiting Paris with his first wife. He went over again, a widower, in 1837 and made her an offer. Hare speaks of her ‘clever vivacity acquired by her early life in France.’ ‘I had,’ she told him, ‘twenty-six years of the most perfect happiness ever allotted to woman.’ Both husband and wife were curious links with the past, for the former, son of the artist Copley, was born at Boston, U.S., in 1772, four years before the Declaration of Independence, while the widow survived till 1891.
Another man who boxed the political compass was James Redhead Yorke. Visiting Paris in 1792, full of enthusiasm for the Revolution,103 and imprisoned for sedition at Dorchester, he not only fell in love with his jailer’s daughter, whom he married on his release, but turned anti-Gallican. He nevertheless in 1802 renewed acquaintance with Paine, who said to him, ‘Do you call this a republic? Why, they are worse off than the slaves in Constantinople.’ Yet Paine had originally, like many intelligent Frenchmen, admired Napoleon. Yorke’s Letters from France were reprinted, like King’s, from a newspaper.
A fourth erratic journalist was William Playfair, brother of the Edinburgh geologist. He had helped to capture the Bastille, but was so disillusioned with the Revolution that on returning to London in 1792 he advocated flooding France with forged assignats as the surest means of overturning the Republic. For this Louis Blanc has pilloried him, but reprehensible as the scheme was, Playfair—what an irony in his name!—was not even entitled to originality, for forged Congressional notes had been circulated during the American War of Independence. Although the English Government did not act on Playfair’s suggestion the royalist émigrés did so, and Napoleon, as we shall see, followed the evil example by counterfeiting English, Austrian, and Russian notes. Playfair on this second visit to Paris had no literary purpose, but in 1820 he published a criticism on Lady Morgan’s book on France. His editorship of Galignani’s Messenger, his inventions, never lucrative, and his pecuniary troubles need not be detailed. Like King and Goldsmith he must be pronounced an adventurer and a weathercock.
Another journalist, James Parry, had just disposed of the Courier, and settled in France. If, as Lord Malmesbury and Goldsmith allege, he had been in the pay of the Directory he deserved, if contempt, forbearance, yet as we shall find he did not obtain any.
Colonel Thomas Thornton had visited France before the Revolution, and had shown hospitality in England to émigrés. He was the only visitor whose object was sport, and he took fourteen hounds with him, albeit game was scarce, as for twelve years the peasants had had it all their own way. Wolves, however, still existed. He published in 1806 A Sporting Tour through France, and going again after Waterloo he purchased Pont-sur-Seine. The mansion, indeed, had been destroyed by the Cossacks, but the outbuildings were capable of habitation. He sold the property, however, in 1821 to Casimir Périer, the grandfather of the future President of the Republic, and died in Paris seven years later, leaving a will in favour of an illegitimate daughter which was annulled by the English tribunals.
We now come to two lady writers. One was Frances Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Francis Bernard, Governor of Massachusetts, and wife of the Rev. Richard King, a Cambridgeshire clergyman. She was intimate with Hannah More, and founded district visiting societies and schools. She published a Tour in France in which she mentions that Boulogne was full of English who had remained there during the Revolution, and that you could scarcely enter a shop there without being addressed in English. She spent seven months in Paris. The other was Anne Plumptree, novelist and translator, daughter of a Huntingdonshire clergyman, and granddaughter of a Cambridge don. She accompanied the Opies. Though a democrat, she admired Napoleon and actually wished him to invade England. Her Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in France (1810) relates chiefly to provincial life, which is an agreeable change after so many books on Paris. I have already mentioned Francis William Blagdon, a prolific author, who, having previously visited France in 1784, published Paris as it was and as it is. I may also mention William Thomas Williams, author in 1807 of The State of France; David Morrice, a schoolmaster, with his View of Modern France and Practical Guide from London to Paris; Stewarton who wrote anonymously or otherwise against Napoleon and Talleyrand; and Israel Worsley, with his State of France (1806). Worsley went back to Dunkirk after Waterloo to re-open a school. In 1828 he undertook to prove the descent of the American Indians from the lost tribes. George Tappen, who was interested in painting and architecture, published a Tour through France and Italy.
John Dean Paul, a banker and future baronet, went over in August 1802 as one of a party of five, accompanied by two servants and a courier. He tells us in his anonymous book, Journal of a Party of Pleasure to Paris, that a young friend of his in the uniform of the Wiltshire Militia was tapped on the shoulder in the Louvre and asked to what regiment he belonged. The inquirer was Bonaparte, who frequently thus accosted British officers. Paul’s son and heir, then an infant, became unpleasantly notorious fifty years later. His daughter married in 1827 Edward Fox Fitzgerald, son of Lord Edward. She lived till 1891. William Beckford, the author of Vathek, had paid several visits to Paris. In October 1782 he passed through it on his way home from Naples. ‘A little impertinent, purse-proud puppy,’ Samuel Meek styled him in his diary, for though staying at the same hotel he had refused to answer an inquiry respecting a nephew of Meek at Naples. He was again in Paris from April 1791 to June 1792, when he ordered a tapestry for his London house, and went on to Lausanne, where he purchased Gibbon’s library. He paid a third visit in February 1793, and left in May with a passport from the municipality viséd by Lebrun, the Foreign Minister; but the Calais authorities detained him until the Convention had been consulted. He left behind him his two riding-horses, which were seized for military baggage trains. The General Safety Committee, declaring them unfit for such work, ordered them to be restored,104 on the ground that Beckford had offered to present two cart-horses which would be much more serviceable, and that from love of liberty he had lived much in France. We hear no particulars of his visit of May 1802.
As for authors on non-French subjects, their name is legion. Let us begin with poets. Wordsworth, it is true, did not go further than Calais, but I have already named Rogers, who had also seen Paris during the Revolution, and now paid it a second visit. He described Napoleon as having a very strong profile, a sallow but not disagreeable complexion, light grey eyes, and scarcely perceptible eyebrows. Fox commissioned Rogers to buy andirons for him in the Palais Royal Arcades. Then there was Walter Savage Landor, who started with admiration for Napoleon, but found ‘not an atom of liberty left.’ He witnessed the festival in the Tuileries gardens in honour of the life-consulate, and he wrote to his brother: ‘I expected that the sky would have been rent with acclamations. On the contrary, he (Bonaparte) experienced such a reception as was given to Richard III. He was sensibly mortified. All bowed, but he waved to and fro, and often wiped his face with his handkerchief. He retired in about ten minutes.’ On returning home and reprinting his Gebir, Landor appended a qualifying note to his line:
‘A mortal man above all mortal praise.’
He called on Paine, and in his Imaginary Conversations (fifth series, XI.) introduced a minute description of him. He represents him as uncombed, unshaven, and unwashed, and as solacing his misfortunes by brandy, yet he makes him foresee Napoleon’s inordinate ambition and fall. Landor revisited Paris in 1814 and 1840. Paine, by the way, was escorted to Havre at the end of August 1802 on his way to America by Thomas, or ‘Clio,’ Rickman, a versifier if not exactly a poet, who named his six sons Paine, Washington, Franklin, Rousseau, Petrarch, and Volney. They were surely to be pitied. Another versifier was William Parsons, who in 1785 had published a magazine at Florence and had associated there with Madame Piozzi, Robert Merry, and Bertie Greatheed. Greatheed, as we have seen, was also now in Paris.
Amongst other writers of works of imagination were Thomas Hope, the author of Anastasia, art connoisseur, and father of Beresford Hope;105 William Combe, who had married Mrs. Cosway’s sister, author of Dr. Syntax, a book widely read in its day; and Edgeworth, who was arrested and but for Whitworth’s remonstrance would have been expelled. He fancied that he had been taken for a brother of the Abbé Edgeworth, Louis XVI.’s confessor, a distant kinsman whom he had never even seen; but the police register106 states that he had indulged in ‘indiscreet talk.’ His eldest son Lovell, as we shall find, did not come off so lightly. Edgeworth was accompanied by his fourth wife, his distinguished daughter Maria, and her younger half-sister Charlotte. He had intended to stay two years, but happily left in time. Maria revisited Paris in 1820.
More matter-of-fact writers included Anthony Aufrere, an art connoisseur, a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine, a translator from the German and Italian, and editor of Lockhart’s Letters. Hazlitt, the critic and essayist, who was introduced to Prosper Merimée’s father, the artist, copied at the Louvre, and paid a second visit in 1824. Filon fancifully suggests that the unborn Prosper was influenced by his mother’s impression of Hazlitt. There was also John Allen, the Edinburgh Reviewer, a ‘man of vast information and great conversational powers,’ says Macaulay, but who, living with Lord Holland from 1801 till his death in 1843, wrote little. John Gifford, the Tory pamphleteer, editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review, a continuation of the famous Anti-Jacobin, had been the author, concocter, or arranger of Letters from France in 1792. His visits to France did not lessen his insular prejudices. In contrast to him there was David Williams, Nonconformist minister and schoolmaster, but now best known as founder and secretary of the Royal Literary Fund. He had been in Paris in the winter of 1792, but seemingly did not attend the British dinner at which an address to the Convention was adopted. Madame Roland regretted that he had not been elected a member of that body in lieu of Paine, but he had reason to congratulate himself on this. Lebrun, Minister of Foreign Affairs, entrusted him with a letter to Grenville regretting the imminence of hostilities and suggesting that, as in the previous war, a few packets might continue to ply between Dover and Calais;107 but the letter received no answer. James Anderson, whose extensive view ranged from chimneys to cattle-breeding and political economy, had corresponded with Washington on ‘moral philosophy and agricultural topics.’ Last, but far from least, was Henry Hallam, as yet a young man of twenty-five.
We now come to four men who made France their home. Quintin Craufurd, a nabob from Manila, acting on his maxim, ‘Make your fortune where you like, but enjoy it at Paris,’ settled there in 1780. He provided the carriage in which the royal family in 1791 attempted to escape. He himself had gone to Brussels, perhaps expecting to meet them, and not venturing to return, his furniture was confiscated. He was now able to resume life in Paris, and frequently played whist with Talleyrand, for cards were his passion. Herbert Croft, nominally a clergyman as well as a baronet, though he had little of the reverend about him, and was dependent on a Government pension of £200, had been the friend of Johnson, whom he furnished with a life of Chatterton. He, like Boswell, was duped by the Ireland forgeries. Just too late to succour Chatterton, he was also just too late to succour a French poet, Grainville, a cousin of Bernardin de St. Pierre; but he happily did not foresee a more direct connection with a third suicide, that of his brother and successor in the title, Princess Charlotte’s surgeon. He wrote in the Argus in 1805 in favour of peace. Becoming the companion of Lady Mary Hamilton, daughter of Lord Leven, another state pensioner (but only to the amount of £80), Croft in 1809 engaged Charles Nodier as his secretary, and Nodier for two years turned into French his and the lady’s productions. Both these amateur authors died in 1816.
The third Anglo-Frenchman was John Fraser Frisell, a Glasgow student who in 1792, at the age of sixteen, went to France to complete his education. Enthusiastic for the Revolution, he was imprisoned for fifteen months at Dijon during the Terror. That imprisonment, however, procured him the lifelong friendship of fellow-captives, Guitant and his wife, who offered him a home from 1794 to 1802, and he thus became intimate with Chateaubriand and Joubert. Chateaubriand styled him the Greek Englishman. Marrying a Frenchwoman, he indulged his passion for Greek authors, for the chase, and for travelling. On the death of a daughter in 1832, Chateaubriand, then himself a political prisoner, wrote an elegy on her. Frisell published in French a treatise on the British constitution, and presented a copy of it to Louis Napoleon in Switzerland, who promised him in return his own sketch of a French constitution. Frisell also contributed to the Journal des Débats.108 He turned Catholic just before his death, which took place at Torquay in 1846.
The fourth Anglo-Frenchman was Henry Grey MacNab, a scion of a Scotch-Irish family who had studied under Reid at Glasgow University. When detained in 1803 he went to Montpellier for eleven years, there studying medicine, political economy, and pedagogy. Before quitting England he had published a pamphlet against a proposed tax on coal, and in Paris in 1808 he wrote on education, on Robert Owen, of whom he was an enthusiastic admirer, and on the state of the world at the beginning of the 19th century. He was honorary physician to the Duke of Kent, to whom he dedicated his book on Owen and whose portrait he prefixed to the French translation. He died in Paris in 1823, leaving an unfinished work on premature burial.
Some visitors deserve notice on account of kinsmen or friends. There are Mary and Agnes Berry, for instance, the ‘sister-wives’ of Horace Walpole, one of whom, born in 1743, survived till 1852. They accompanied their father. Mrs. Damer introduced them to Napoleon, his mother, Josephine, and Madame de Staël. This last lady thought Mary by far the cleverest Englishwoman she had met. The Berrys had seen Paris in 1791. They must have been pleased with their visit in the spring of 1802, for they went again in October with Mrs. Damer on their way to Nice and Geneva, passing through Germany and embarking at Hamburg for England in May. We may dispose more summarily of Francis (brother of Sir John) Moore; William Monsell, whose son, successively Paymaster-General, Postmaster-General, and Vice-President of the Board of Trade, became Lord Emly; and Sir Herbert Pakington, grandfather of the Secretary for War of 1867–1868. Henry Bickersteth, surgeon, was the father of the hymnologist and of Lord Langdale, Master of the Rolls, while Sir Henry Tichborne and his brother James were respectively great-uncle and grandfather of the Roger Tichborne personated by Arthur Orton. Henry Herbert Southey, a youth of nineteen studying medicine at Norwich, had there made the acquaintance of William Taylor, whom he now accompanied. His brother, the poet, had, on a visit to Norwich in 1798, formed a friendship with Taylor, in spite of their political and religious differences. Young Southey became physician to George iv. and Queen Adelaide.109 Timothy Priestley must have been the son of Timothy, brother of the famous Priestley. The two brothers, both Nonconformist ministers, differed in doctrine. James Wollstonecraft was probably one of the three brothers of Mary. He was a London merchant, and in 1798 had been expelled from Paris, apparently as a suspected spy. A Mr. Adderley was probably Charles Bowyer Adderley, great-uncle of the present Lord Norton, but he may have been Thomas Adderley, an Irish M.P. in 1790. Mrs. Peploe of Herefordshire, who accompanied her husband, was the aunt of Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Anthony Storer, Secretary of the Paris Embassy in 1783, was apparently the nephew and heir of Anthony Morris Storer of Purley, a man of fashion and a bibliophile, an M.P. in 1772. General Scott was probably the father-in-law of Canning and of the Duke of Portland; he was reputed to have made money at previous visits by gambling, and Canning’s wife had a bequest of £100,000. Shuckburgh Ashby Apreece had a fascinating wife, the widow of a John Kerr. Her literary receptions at Edinburgh were famous, and people fancied she was the original of Madame de Staël’s Corinne. Again a widow, she married in 1812 Sir Humphry Davy. A Mr. Tilt was probably the father of John Tilt, a Brighton physician who introduced into England the speculum, with which he had become acquainted through Récamier. Denis Disney Ffytche was doubtless the nephew of Dr. John Disney, a Lincolnshire vicar related I think to the Tennysons, who became a noted Unitarian minister in London, and also of Lewis Disney of Swinderby, who added his wife’s name of Ffytche. If so, he must have been bent on recovering his uncle’s property at Chambourcy, near Paris, for Lewis Disney, leaving for Switzerland with his two daughters and their governess in March 1793, had been classed as an émigré and had vainly pleaded for restitution. James Forbes, a nabob of whom we shall hear again, was the grandfather of Montalembert, the French historian. Of Richard Trench, a barrister, father of Archbishop Trench, we shall also hear later on. John Sympson Jessopp, a landowner and barrister, was destined to be the father of Dr. Augustus Jessopp. He was accompanied by his younger brother, and we shall hear of them too again.
Should we reckon among Englishmen George Francis Grand, Madame Talleyrand’s first husband? He was a native of Lausanne, but entered the East India Company’s service, started an English factory, and married in India Catherine Noel Judde, daughter of Peter John Worle, a Dane, harbour-master of Chandernagor. He divorced her in India, and in 1798, having returned to Europe in straitened circumstances, obtained a French, divorce likewise. He now repaired to Paris, to solicit through his ex-wife’s influence a Government appointment; but he was unjustly suspected of seeking to extort money from Talleyrand. It was alleged, indeed, that he exacted 80,000 f. by a threat of disputing the validity of the divorce, and that on returning to London he demanded an additional £10,000. ‘Never did a husband,’ writes a Bourbon agent, ‘make so much profit out of his wife’s infidelity, and never did a man play so pitiful a role as M. de Talleyrand.’110 What is certain is that Grand was assigned a post at the Cape under the so-called Batavian republic, really a French dependency. When England seized the Cape he remained there till his death in 1821.111 He is said to have married again.
There were fugitives from law or justice, and other black sheep. William Ward, yeoman and land-agent of Benenden, Kent, who had been enthusiastic for the French Revolution, got into difficulties—‘through slovenly book-keeping’ says Mr. C. F. Hardy, editor of the Benenden Letters,—and took refuge in France, where he died in 1821, aged ninety-three. He had settled at Valenciennes, and under the Berlin decree of 1807 was for five years, in spite of his age, treated as a prisoner of war. His honesty seems unimpeachable, but as much cannot be said for another land-agent, Thomas Stone, who had acted for the Duke of Bedford and for Lord Digby. They had every apparent reason to trust him, for he was an Enclosure Commissioner and was employed by the Board of Agriculture in writing county reports. His love of style and conviviality, however, led him astray, and he now absconded to Paris with his wife and five children, leaving a large sum due to Lord Digby. He for a time lived in luxury, affected to be bent on improving French agriculture, and talked of buying and stocking a large farm. In reality he had no money, and in 1804 he was charged with forging a cheque, but was acquitted. He more than once applied for permission to visit Normandy to buy sheep, but was refused.112 Latterly dependent on the earnings of his wife and daughter, he died in Paris in 1815, at the age of eighty-three. Speaking of land-agents reminds me that some small English land-owners, as the Marquis of Buckingham was informed, sold their property, invested part of the proceeds in the funds, so as to ensure the same income as before, and had settled in France on land purchased at ten and a half years’ rental. Such cases, however, must have been very rare, and Napoleon, as we have seen, debarred foreigners from holding real property; but Thomas Talbot, brother of an admiral, may have had the idea of colonisation in France, though he ultimately obtained a grant of 5000 acres on the shore of Lake Erie, where he founded Port Talbot. As for artisans who went over, enticed by reports of high wages and cheap living, they were speedily disillusioned and were glad to return.
We may include among the outlaws, though he was not of English birth, Bodini, who had been editor of Bell’s Messenger and had been expelled under the Alien Act. He joined the staff of the Argus in Paris. A note of the French police describes him as a man of caustic speech, turning everything into ridicule, and consequently having no friends. He pretended, it says, to have made important revelations to Napoleon, for whom, according to another account, he dissected, so to speak, the London newspapers.
We come lastly to émigrés who took the opportunity of returning to France, for several of them were Britons by birth, while others, having resided in England, possess some interest for us. There was Charles Jerningham, who had served in the French army, and now, reclaiming confiscated papers, pleaded that he had never in exile fought against France.113 Lady Jerningham, his mother, however, was so patriotic an Englishwoman that on the renewal of the war she proposed to raise and head a body of six hundred men, who, in case of invasion, should drive all the cattle from the East Anglian coast into the interior of the country. Daniel Charles O’Connell, of Darrynane, styled in France Count O’Connell, uncle of the Liberator, was one of the earliest arrivals. Entering the French army in 1762 at the age of seventeen, he had taken part in the siege of Gibraltar in 1766, and in 1788 had drawn up articles of war by which the French army is still governed. On the fall of the monarchy he went to England, where in 1796 he married the Countess Bellevue, an exile like himself. In February 1802 he repaired to Paris with his wife and two stepdaughters, in the hope of recovering her property in St. Domingo. He calculated on returning in August, but he stayed, as we shall see, too long. He was naturalised in 1818, and was made a French peer; he died in 1835. Another émigré was Arthur Dillon, a connection of the guillotined general of that name, who had with difficulty escaped from France during the Terror. Curiously enough Réné de Montalembert, though an émigré, visited Paris as an English officer, for in 1799 he had entered the British army, and had served in the West Indies and Egypt. He afterwards served in India and Spain, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, but after Waterloo returned to France and was appointed to an embassy at Stuttgart. He had married in 1808 James Forbes’s daughter, Eliza Rose, and their son, mostly brought up by Forbes, was the historian of whom Pasquier aptly said, ‘he is an Anglo-Saxon Frenchman.’ Fagan, ex-captain in Dillon’s regiment, who also re-entered France, was despatched in 1810 by Fouché, without Napoleon’s knowledge, to discuss peace with Lord Wellesley. This occasioned Fouché’s dismissal. Alexander d’Arblay preceded his English wife, the famous Fanny Burney. His friend Lauriston had arranged that, after serving a year in St. Domingo, he should retire from the French army on a pension; but on his writing an indiscreet letter to Napoleon to say that he could never bear arms against England he was struck off the roll. Hoping, however, that Napoleon’s irritation would evaporate, he sent for his wife and child in April 1802, and on war breaking out they were unable, being French subjects, to return to England till 1812, when, during the Emperor’s absence, d’Arblay managed to procure a passport for them. He himself had meanwhile obtained a post in the Ministry of the Interior. Lally Tollendal, who went over to obtain restitution of his property, had also married an Englishwoman, Amelia Hardcastle, and in April 1802 she rejoined her husband and his daughter by his first wife.
The most prominent of the returning exiles was Calonne, Louis XVI.’s Minister of Finance. He was the man who, when asked by Marie Antoinette to do something which she acknowledged to be difficult, replied, ‘If it is merely difficult, madam, you may consider it already done: if it is impossible it shall be done.’ Shortly after his dismissal from office he had married Madame Haveley, widow of a rich Paris financier. She is described as English, but I am unable to ascertain her maiden name. Taking refuge in England in 1788, and there assisting Madame La Motte in her scurrilous pamphlet on the diamond necklace, Calonne was at first very bountiful to his fellow-exiles, but he soon quarrelled with them. He went to Paris in May 1802, but must have intended returning to England, for he had applied to Merry for a passport when he was taken ill, and expired on the 30th September. Another prominent politician was Montlosier, the member of the National Assembly who, in opposing the confiscation of the bishops’ revenues, exclaimed, ‘You deprive them of their gold crosses, but they will take the wooden cross which has saved the world.’ He had edited the Courrier de Londres, which was so favourable to Napoleon that he was allowed to return from exile and have his paper partly printed in Paris. It was, however, suppressed after a few weeks, and Montlosier was appointed editor of the Bulletin de Paris, in which he requited British hospitality by vilifying the English. In all other respects his political career down to his death in 1838 was highly creditable. Cazalès, who before emigrating had deprecated violent measures in the National Assembly, also re-entered France, and was offered, but declined, office under the Consulate.
The Duke and Duchess de Fitz-James—he was a descendant of James II. with the bend sinister—were émigrés of a different stamp, being staunch royalists. So also, I believe, was Colonel O’Mahony. Patrick Wall, who at eighteen had in 1745 been with the Young Pretender, had been wounded at Culloden, and had then entered the French army, in like manner returned to France. An uncle, also a Jacobite refugee, had bequeathed him a handsome property. He died at Chatillon-sur-Seine in 1809.
The returning exiles included a multitude of priests. Sir John Carr crossed over from Southampton to Havre with some of them, one being, he says, ninety-five years of age, who was scarcely expected to land alive. There were also wives and daughters of Toulon refugees. It is unpleasant to read in Henri Martin’s history that some of these clerical passengers afterwards repaid the hospitality they had enjoyed, by vilifying England in episcopal pastorals, in order to curry favour with Napoleon.